The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes (Oxford Handbooks)

This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes across a wide range of contemporary linguistic theories, such as Cognitive Grammar, Minimalist Syntax, and Lexical Functional Grammar, while the focus of Part III is on individual word classes, from major categories such as verb and noun to minor ones such as adpositions and ideophones. Part IV provides a number of cross-linguistic case studies, exploring word classes in families including Afroasiatic, Sinitic, Mayan, Austronesian, and in sign languages. Chapters in the final part of the book discuss word classes from the perspective of various sub-disciplines of linguistics, ranging from first and second language acquisition to computational and corpus linguistics. Together, the contributions showcase the importance of word classes for the whole discipline of linguistics, while also highlighting the many ongoing debates in the areas and outlining fruitful avenues for future research. Cover Series The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes Copyright Contents Acknowledgements List of figures and tables List of abbreviations Notes on the contributors 1. Introduction Part I Fundamental issues 2. Word-​class universals and language-​particular analysis 3. Levels of analysis and word classes (root, stem, word) 4. Lexical vs grammatical words 5. Transcategorial operations 6. Word-​class systems and other grammatical properties Part II Theoretical approaches 7. Word classes in Formal Semantics 8. Word classes in Cognitive Grammar 9. Word classes and gradience 10. Lexeme classes and word classes in Functional Discourse Grammar 11. Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar 12. Word classes in Minimalist Syntax 13. Lexical categories in Distributed Morphology 14. Word classes in Head-​driven Phrase Structure Grammar 15. Word classes in Lexical Functional Grammar Part III Specific word classes 16. Verbs 17. Nouns 18. Adjectives 19. Adverbs 20. Adpositions 21. Demonstratives 22. Ideophones 23. Interjections Part IV Word classes in genetic and areal language groups 24. Word classes in Egyptian, Semitic, and Cushitic (Afroasiatic) 25. Word classes in Mande languages 26. Word classes in Australian languages 27. Word classes in Indo-​European languages 28. Word classes in classical Chinese 29. Word classes in Salish languages 30. Word classes in Iroquoian languages 31. Word classes in Eskimo–​Aleut languages 32. Word classes in Mayan languages 33. Word classes in Maweti–​Guarani languages 34. Word classes in Quechuan languages 35. Word classes in Austronesian languages 36. Word classes in Timor–​Alor–​Pantar and the Papuan region 37. Word classes in sign languages Part V Word classes in linguistic subdisciplines 38. Word classes in corpus linguistics 39. Word classes and grammaticalization 40. Word classes in first language acquisition 41. Word classes in second language acquisition 42. Word classes in language contact 43. Word classes in psycholinguistics 44. Word classes in neurolinguistics 45. Word classes in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence References Index of languages Subject index handbook of word classes Series