THE LANGUAGE OF LANGUAGE: CORE CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (2nd ed.). Madalena Cruz-Ferreira and Sunita Anne Abraham. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006. Pp. iii + 266. $32.00 paper.

This 12-chapter volume is designed to introduce a student with no previous experience to the field of linguistics. The chapters are arranged to focus on the various facets of language, with each chapter building on the preceding one. Chapter 1, “Language and Linguistics,” and chapter 2, “Language and Languages,” offer an introduction to language as a concept. Chapters 3 and 4 have a word-level focus, whereas chapters 5 and 6 focus on sounds. Chapters 7 and 8 synthesize the previous chapters to discuss language on the sentence level. Chapters 10–12 use the discussion of language structure presented in the previous chapters to direct the reader's attention to the meaning of language as a whole. These last four chapters discuss language meaning, discourse, and the relationship between language and humans.