Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; new coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.