Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Her lengthy grammar, The Manambu Language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, was published by OUP in 2008. Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause Linking, appeared in 2009.

"Imperatives and Commands offers a wealth of empirical data and covers almost every relevant topic imaginable. Unlike any article or book before, it describes the crosslinguistic variation in imperatives and alternative directive strategies in a clear and thorough way...[It] constitutes a reference work for field workers, who will welcome the appended checklist "of what kind of features need to be described, analysed, and illustrated," and for anyone interested in imperatives and directives. Researchers will also enjoy the extensive author, language, and subject indexes and the vast bibliography."--Linguistic Typology