Introduction

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to provide the student of language with alternatives that have been proposed in contemporary linguistics for analysing and understanding the structure of human languages. It then discusses various topics dealing with linguistic analysis and the creation of this book, including groupings and cleavages among the various approaches to linguistic analysis, analogies used for understanding linguistic phenomena, domains of language structure, relations among domains, the nature of structures, lexical vs. functional categories, and language evolution.