This edited volume presents the field of human, or “hard-science,” linguistics, which asks the question, “How do people communicate with language?” The concept grew out of the need to reconcile the abstractness of grammar with observations about human psychology, memory, and behavior. The goal of the field is to steer the discipline of linguistics away from the “soft sciences” of philosophy and social sciences, in which it is typically classified, and into the domain of hard science, which includes biology, physics, and chemistry. Proponents of hard-science linguistics believe that, as a physical science, linguistics should study objective, observable evidence from the physical world – for example, sound waves of speech – rather than philosophical and other non-physical constructs. Only in this way, they say, will linguistics be able to offer hypotheses that are verifiable with the methods of standard scientific inquiry.

The volume is comprised of 23 chapters, arranged in seven parts. Part I, “Orientation to hard-science linguistics,” written by Yngve, includes a collection of papers that introduces the field and the justification for this alternative to more traditional ideas of what linguistic research should be. Rather than developing theories of grammar and language, hard-science linguists must propose theories of how people interact with each other and their environments; instead of testing grammatical theories against intuitions, researchers must test theories about people against observable, real-world objects. Yngve believes that philosophical theories of language not substantiated by what he and other proponents of hard-science linguistics claim is the core of the discipline, scientific testing, should be rejected in favor of a linguistic model that can be evaluated in accordance with the principles of scientific inquiry.

The philosophy of hard-science linguistics influences a variety of linguistic subfields touched upon in this volume. Part II, about phonetics and phonology, covers the physical properties of sound systems; part III on language in context examines foundational theories in the philosophy of language and attempts to reformulate them into testable structures; the section on variation and historical linguistics (part IV) posits that language does not change, rather people do, and this drives variation and change; part V on social and psychological issues investigates the human capacity of memory and how individuals act in small groups; and part VI introduces some areas in which hard-science linguistics could play a practical, applied role, for example in translation and publishing. In addition to part I, of most interest to the reader new to hard-science linguistics will be part VII, written by Yngve and Wąsik, which summarizes the differences between hard-science linguistics and traditional linguistics, and the advantages to be had in adopting the principles of hard-science linguistics instead of more traditional models.