前言
The book was not intended to be a textbook at the beginning. I have to teach in English as I am working at the Department of Applied English at Southern Taiwan University of Science and
Technology. It is true that I wrote in Chinese two different introductory textbooks for different purposes. Most of the data used there were novel and some were even based on unpublished
research. They were, to some extent, of great value to me. In practical teaching, those data ran naturally into my lectures. In the process of editing the lectures into a book, I tried very
hard to erase those published data. However, some were still left, though they appeared in English this time.
The readers are supposed to be English majors at the college level, who are not trained to be linguists in particular. For this reason, basic concepts about linguistics required for beginners
are fully provided with a detailed illustration. The essential goal is to help teachers lead the students into a new field of humanity science: linguistics. Some of the terminologies and ideas
might be foreign to students. However, more data together with further interpretation in this volume are expected to help them overcome difficulties in reading. Even if this is the case, I am
still of the position that not every student was born or trained to be a linguist. When I was a college student, I was one of those who did not like linguistics. I was all at sea in the
linguistic class. Nevertheless, what I was did nothing to stop what I am. For this reason, no student can be deprived of her/his right to be sitting comfortably in a linguistics class.
When I was asked to teach An Introduction to English Linguistics for those who wanted to be teachers, I spent a lot of time searching for a good textbook for this course. Although there were
different versions of textbooks in the market, more than needed indeed, there were few suitable for our students as beginners. Most of the imported textbooks were both expensive and complicated
in writing. Furthermore, most of the linguistic terminologies were illustrated with African or other un-known languages, which made teachers and learners feel even worse.
Under such circumstances, the idea occurred to me that I had to write a textbook in English. That’s the basic motivation for this volume. The goal of this book is essentially twofold. On the
one hand, the price of the textbook should be less than half of most English textbooks in linguistics. On the other, most of the basic concepts should be interpreted on the basis of Mandarin,
Southern Min, Hakka, or any Formosan language data. In other words, this is kind of nativized version of textbook on general linguistics.
Manuscripts of this book at different stage were used for teaching materials in the graduate and the undergraduate programs in the past three years. I would like to thank my students at
Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology for insightful feedbacks, most of which have been integrated here. In addition, many thanks are due to my assistants. Without their help,
this work can never be possible. Finally, I sincerely thank the team of Cosmo Publishing Co. Ltd., who help this book come into being.