The fourth edition of General Linguistics provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to linguistics.

The book considers:

- semantics and pragmatics
- dialect and style
- phonetics and phonology
- morphology and syntax, with reference both to traditional and current theories
- comparative-historical linguistics and linguistic typology
- linguistics' relation to other disciplines
- the practical application of linguistics
- the 2,500 years of linguistic thought that lies behind what we do and think today

R.H. Robins

Part 1: General linguistics - the scope of the subject: linguistics as the study of language, and as a science; semantics

Part 2: Theoretical and methodological considerations: abstractions; dialect, idiolect, style; the structural treatment of lexical meaning

Part 3: Phonetics: articulatory phonetics; the organs of speech; segmentation - vowel and consonant; acoustic phonetics; plurisegmental features; phonetics in linguistics

Part 4: Phonology: speech and writing; narrow and broad transcription; the phoneme theory; further developments

Part 5: Grammar - grammatical elements: the sentence; the word; the morpheme; the semantic status of morphemes

Part 6: Grammar - grammatical classes, structures and categories: syntactic relations; word classes; immediate constituents; grammatical categories; subclasses and irregularities; transformational-generative linguistics (TG), the theory of syntax, generalized phase structure grammar (GPSG), dependency grammars, post-"structuralist" theories, tagmemics, M.A.K.Halliday - systemic grammar, and stratificational linguistics

Part 7: Linguistic comparison: historically orientated comparison of languages (comparative and historical linguistics); typological comparison

Part 8: Wider perspectives: linguistics and anthropology; - and sociology; - and philosophy; - and psychology; - and language teaching; - and communications engineering; - and literature; outline of the history of linguistic studies in Western Europe