This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to the scientific study of language. It is aimed at students who are taking university courses in Linguistics, as well as the broader public interested in understanding how languages are studied scientifically.

The reference language for this work is Greek. This promotes a more effective clarification of the scientific concepts introduced, based on Greek linguistic data, while simultaneously allowing for the exploration of specific peculiarities—grammatical, historical, or otherwise—of the Greek language.

To ensure accurate and scientifically rigorous information, the individual chapters have been written by specialists in their respective fields. The volume is structured into two main parts. In the first part, the "building blocks" of language are presented, starting from the smallest (the sounds/phonemes) and reaching the largest (the utterances).

In the second part, various specific aspects of language are explored (language change, the relationship between language and society, the relationship between language and ideology), as well as aspects that relate it both to human cognition more broadly (language and the brain) and to artificial intelligence systems (language and computers).

Contents

Introduction

1. Phonetics

2. Phonology

3. Morphology

4. Syntax

5. Semantics

6. Pragmatics

7. Discourse Analysis

8. Historical Linguistics

9. Sociolinguistics

10. Dialectology and Modern Greek Dialects