Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction is a comprehensive, fully up-to-date introduction to linguistics. All the core topics of linguistics are covered, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, the genetic and typological classification of the languages of the world, and historical linguistics. Interdisciplinary areas discussed include language and the brain, psycholinguistics - the study of language processing, first and second language acquisition, language in social contexts and the fast-growing area of computational linguistics.