This chapter considers the ways in which the classical credal and conciliar formulae provide a framework for understanding who Jesus Christ is and how God saves through the Incarnate Word. These credal and conciliar formulae provide the foundation for theologies across the spectrum of Christian traditions. The chapter is broadly divided into two sections, one focusing on the fourth century Trinitarian controversies, the second focusing on the christological controversies of the fifth to the seventh centuries. For classical Christian theology, only when Jesus is known as the Word made flesh, and as one coequal to Father and Spirit in the divine life, can the work of redemption be understood.

The wordless, often unwritable sound of the vox confusa is usually contrasted with the verbal, writeable sound of the vox articulata. The former was held to be irrational and meaningless; the latter, rational and significant. This chapter will examine the role which the vox confusa played in Augustine’s thought. It will argue that, in his later works, we encounter a wild(er) Augustine who appears to be more willing than his earlier self to recognise and exploit the vox confusa in a theological context.

This chapter introduces the concept of grammar of a particular language. The basic units of grammar in Chinese are introduced in order to underline the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese grammar. By comparing Chinese with English, the chapter demonstrates that Chinese words have no form changes in sentences regardless of quantity or tense; thus, the relationship between words plays an important role in determining their parts of speech.

This chapter introduces simple sentences in terms of their components and structures. The functions of a simple sentence are explained. Special simple sentences without a subject or a predicate are introduced by their grammatical features and functions.

This chapter tackles questions such as how to differentiate a word from a nonword and what features should be ascribed to a word.

This chapter looks at the inner structure of words, the intricate networks of their senses.

This chapter looks into the issues of the links between the words in the lexicon and how words cross from one language to another.

In this chapter we consider more closely what we mean by a word. We begin by contrasting the differences between the mental lexicon and dictionaries. We then introduce students to the methods and techniques that psycholinguists use for studying the mental lexicon. We look at reaction time experiments, brain imaging, and the ways in which we can study individuals with aphasia and genetic disorders that affect lexical knowledge. Students are introduced to how children acquire morphology. We then look at English past tense morphology in the context of the ‘storage versus rules’ debate, considering what experimentation, brain imaging, and the study of aphasia and genetic disorders tell us about this controversy. The chapter ends with a brief history of dictionaries.

This chapter introduces students to the study of morphology. We look in a preliminary way at the difficulty inherent in defining what we mean by a word and introduce the term morpheme. We introduce the basic concepts of simple versus complex words. Students learn the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes. We end with a brief introduction to the difference between inflection and derivation.

In Chapter 3, students explore the principles behind morphology and syntax. Students are led through a variety of examples that illustrate a range of morphological phenomena. Discover Activities prompt individual analysis to reinforce salient points. After discussing a few of the ways languages’ morphology blends into their syntax, a full discussion of grammatical functions in the syntactic sense is undertaken. Progressing through question formation, movement, and word order, students then explore natural language examples that illustrate a variety of syntactic and morphological concepts.

In the introduction I argue that it is difficult to understand how language is acquired, processed or used by examining single words. We immediately run into problems of implausible cognitive processing loads of constructing language word by word and inescapable ambiguity any text must be creating. Thus phraseological approaches to language seem to give more promise. This book focuses on one approach, known as the idiom principle, proposed by John Sinclair. The approach is applied to second language learners of English who are often claimed to be restricted in their ability to operate on the idiom principle. The introduction situates this topic in a broader context of current interests in linguistic and psycholinguistic inquiry and explains how it is related to such concepts as chunking, statistical learning, implicit and explicit processing, ad hoc concepts and L2 or LX user.