The Oxford Handbook of the Word

by John R. Taylor (Editor)

Overview

This handbook addresses words in all their multifarious aspects and brings together scholars from every relevant discipline to do so. The many subjects covered include word frequencies; sounds and sound symbolism; the structure of words; taboo words; lexical borrowing; words in dictionaries and thesauri; word origins and change; place and personal names; nicknames; taxonomies; word acquisition and bilingualism; words in the mind; word disorders; and word games, puns, and puzzles.

Words are the most basic of all linguistic units, the aspect of language of which everyone is likely to be most conscious. A 'new' word that makes it into the OED is prime news; when baby says its first word its parents reckon it has started to speak; knowing a language is often taken to mean knowing its words; and languages are seen to be related by the similarities between their words. Up to the twentieth century linguistic description was mainly an account of words and all the current subdivisions of linguistics have something to say about them. A notable feature of human languages is the sheer vastness of their word inventories, and scholars and writers have sometimes deliberately increased the richness of their languages by coining or importing new items into their word-hoards. The book presents scholarship and research in a manner that meets the interests of students and professionals and satisfies the curiosity of the educated reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198808633
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2018
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	894
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

John R. Taylor obtained his PhD in 1979 and was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Otago until his retirement in 2010. He is the author of Possessives in English (1996), Cognitive Grammar (2002), Linguistic Categorization (3rd edition 2003), and The Mental Corpus (2012; paperback 2014), all published by Oxford University Press, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics (2014). He is a managing editor for the series Cognitive Linguistics Research (Mouton de Gruyter) and an Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

Table of Contents

Introduction
PART I WORDS: GENERAL ASPECTS
1. The lure of words, David Crystal
2. How many words are there?, Adam Kilgarriff
3. Words and dictionaries, Marc Alexander
4. Words and thesauri, Christian Kay
5. Word frequencies, Joseph Sorell
6. Word length, Peter Gryzbek
7. Multi-word items, Rosamund Moon
8. Words and their neighbours, Michael Hoey
PART II WORDS AND LINGUISTIC THEORY
9. The structure of words, Geert E. Booij
10. Word categories, Mark C. Smith
11. The word and syntax, Nikolas Gisborne
12. The prosodic word, Kristine A. Hildebrandt
13. The word as a universal category, Andrew Hippisley
14. Taboo words, Kate Burridge
15. Sound symbolism, G. Tucker Childs
PART III MEANINGS, REFERENTS, AND CONCEPTS
16. Word meaning, Nick Riemer
17. Words as names for objects, actions, relations, and properties, Barbara C. Malt
18. Terminologies and taxonomies, Marie-Claude L'Homme
19. Lexical relations, Christiane Fellbaum
20. Comparing lexicons cross-linguistically, Asifa Majid
21. Words as carriers of cultural meaning, Cliff Goddard
PART IV WORDS IN TIME AND SPACE
22. Etymology, Philip Durkin
23. How words and vocabularies change, Dirk Geeraerts
24. Lexical borrowing, Anthony P. Grant
25. Lexical layers, Margaret E. Winters
PART V WORDS IN THE MIND
26. Word associations, Simon de Deyne and Gert Storms
27. Accessing words from the mental lexicon, Niels O. Schiller and Rinus G. Verdonschot
28. The bilingual lexicon, John N. Williams
29. Words and neuropsychological disorders, Dennis Tay
PART VI WORDS IN ACQUISITION LEARNING
30. First words, Eve V. Clark
31. How infants find words, Katharine Graf Estes
32. Roger Brown's 'original word game', Reese M. Heitner
33. Which words do you need?, Paul Nation
34. Words in second language learning and teaching, Frank Boers
PART VII NAMES
35. Names, John M. Anderson
36. Personal names, Benjamin Blount
37. Place and other names, Carole Hough
38. Nicknames, Robert Kennedy
39. Choosing a name: how name givers' feelings influence their selections, Cynthia Whissell
PART VIII FUN WITH WORDS
40. Funny words: verbal humour, Victor Raskin
41. Word puzzles, Henk J. Verkuyl
A FINAL WORD
42. Why are we so sure we know what a word is?, Alison Wray
References
Index of Languages
Subject Index