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I purchased this text book for my college class. It is not the most helpful book in the world. The explanations are often long winded and answers are only provided for 1 question per exercise which isn't very helpful. The book relies heavily on jargon and often does not provide clear explanations for the concepts. I have found myself relying heavily on internet articles to supplement this book and provide a clear explanation. This is a decent book if you have a background in linguistics, but not if you are a student with no background.

I am currently taking a graduate applied linguistics course and this is our text. It is a frustrating book. Half of each chapter is devoted to practice "exercises" {the book is subtitled "a primer with exercises"}, however the authors provide answers for less than 10% of these exercises which are supposed to help us understand each new concept.

Further, I am extremely disappointed that with each concept introduced, on average only one example of the concept is given. Imagine trying to understand a concept of word relations, when only one example is provided, when the study of linguistics implies that there are so many different ways to interpret words and sentences. With only one example, what if my interpretation of the example is "wrong" and I go on to apply this wrong interpretation to further understandings and problems.

In our course we have to answer the chapter questions, and since there has been so little modeling in the book itself, and this is an online class, I cannot adequately judge if I am learning the concepts throughout the chapter exercises that I then have to demonstrate for a grade at the end of the chapter.

The lack of answers to the instructional content of this text makes me feel like I paid for one text book, and the authors supplied only half a text book. Please don't choose this text for your course unless the authors include complete answers for the practice exercises in future editions.

purchased for my husband who likes it. He had checked out this book from a library and decided he wanted to have one.

The most BORING textbook you will ever read.

The book is excellent, everything I expected. Although used, and therefore contains many highlighter markings inside, it is a a good resource for my English grammar courses..
However, it took forever to arrive. I ordered it at the beginning of the semester and it got here 2/3 of the way through the course.
Other than that, everything was aceptable.

This text provides great examples and explanations for students to aquire an understanding of foundational linguistics. Every teacher should be required to study this text in an undergraduate course.

Good layout, however needs more exercises with answers. Glad I bought the book but feel more work would be useful to test my comprehension.

This is a very clear introduction to the various fields of linguistics (The chapters are: Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Morphology, Phonology, Language Variation, First Language Acquisition, Second Language Acquisition, Written Language, Language Processing, The Neurology of Language). The book explains the basic concepts and gives some examples. There is a "Supplementary Readings" section at the end of each chapter with recommendations for specialized books on these topics. The exercises the first reviewer is complaining about are mostly very basic and it seems to me that they are designed to give additional examples rather than to challenge the reader. The text focuses on English, which is OK for an introductory book. One thing that may make you think twice before buying this book is its price, which naturally reflects the ideology of the textbook publishing companies - "Students are _required_ to buy textbooks, so we might as well charge them a fortune."