The Oxford Handbook of the Word

Edited by John R. Taylor

Oxford Handbooks

Strikes a balance between scholarly coverage and depth and accessibility
The only single-volume guide encompassing approaches to words from a wide range of perspectives
Brings together a distinguished group of international scholars from different theoretical backgrounds

The Oxford Handbook of the Word

Edited by John R. Taylor

Description

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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Word

Edited by John R. Taylor

Oxford Handbooks

Introduction
1: The lure of words, David Crystal
2: How many words are there?, Adam Kilgarriff
3: Dictionaries, Marc Alexander
4: Words and thesauri, Christian Kay
5: Word frequencies, Joseph Sorell
6: Word length, Peter Gryzbek
7: Which words do you need?, Paul Nation
8: Words in second language learning and teaching, Frank Boers
9: The structure of words, Geert Booij
10: Word categories, Mark Smith
11: Words as grammatical units, Nik Gisborne
12: Words as phonological units, Kristine Hildebrand
13: The word as a universal category, Andrew Hippisley
14: Word meaning, Nick Riemer
15: Words as names of categories, Barbara Malt
16: Terminologies and taxonomies, Marie-Claude L'Homme
17: Lexical relations, Christiane Fellbaum
18: Comparing lexicons cross-linguistically, Asifa Majid
19: Words as carriers of cultural meaning, Cliff Goddard
20: Multi-word idioms, Rosamund Moon
21: Words and their neighbours, Michael Hoey
22: Taboo words, Kate Burridge
23: Sound symbolism, Tucker Childs
24: Etymology, Philip Durkin
25: How words (and vocabularies) change, Dirk Geeraerts
26: Borrowing words, Anthony Grant
27: Lexical layers, Margaret Winters
28: Word associations, Simon de Deyne and Gert Storms
29: Accessing words, Niels O. Schiller and Rinus Verdonschot
30: The bilingual lexicon, John Williams
31: First words, Eve V. Clark
32: How infants find words, Katharine Graf-Estes
33: Roger Brown's 'original word game', Reese Heitner
34: Names, John M. Anderson
35: Personal names, Benjamin Blount
36: Place and other names, Carole Hough
37: Nicknames, Robert Kennedy
38: Choosing a name: How name givers' feelings influence name selection, Cynthia Whissell
39: Words and neuropsychological disorders, Dennis Tay
40: Verbal humour, Victor Raskin
41: Word puzzles, Henk Verkuyl
42: Do words exist? And if not, why do we believe that they do?, Alison Wray?

The Oxford Handbook of the Word

Edited by John R. Taylor

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Edited by John R. Taylor

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.

Contributors:

Marc Alexander, University of Glasgow
John M. Anderson, University of Edinburgh
Benjamin Blount, University of Texas San Antonio (retired)
Frank Boers, Victoria University of Wellington
Geert Booij, Leiden University
Kate Burridge, Monash University
Tucker Childs, Portland State University
Eve V. Clark, Stanford University
David Crystal, University of Bangor
Simon De Deyne, University of Adelaide
Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor of the OED
Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University
Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven
Nik Gisborne, University of Edinburgh
Cliff Goddard, Griffith University
Katharine Graf-Estes, University of California Davis
Anthony Grant, Edge Hill University
Reese Heitner, Drexel University
Kristine Hildebrandt, University of California Santa Barbara
Andrew Hippisley, University of Kentucky
Michael Hoey, University of Liverpool
Carole Hough, University of Glasgow
Christian Kay, University of Glasgow
Robert Kennedy, University of California Santa Barbara
Adam Kilgarriff, Director of Lexical Computing Ltd
Marie-Claude L'Homme, University of Montreal
Barbara C. Malt, Lehigh University
Asifa Majid, Radboud University Nijmegen
Rosamund Moon, University of Birmingham
Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington
Victor Raskin, Purdue University
Nicholas Riemer, University of Sydney
Niels O. Schiller, Leiden University
Mark C. Smith, Open University
Gert Storms, University of Leuven
Dennis Tay, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
John R. Taylor, University of Otago (retired)
Rinus Verdonschot, Leiden University
Henk Verkuyl, Utrecht University
Cynthia Whissell, Laurentian University
John Williams, University of Cambridge
Margaret Winters, Wayne State University
Alison Wray, Cardiff University