Overview
This handbook offers a detailed and wide-ranging account of expressivity, the essential property that allows natural language to not just describe something in the world, but to directly express or display the speaker's attitudes or emotions. Following the editors' introduction, which outlines the expressive turn in linguistics, the volume is divided into five parts. Part I lays out the historical background and foundations of expressivity in philology, philosophy, semiotics, and rhetoric, before Part II shows how it plays a major role in all linguistic domains, fields of research, and frameworks, from syntax and semantics to corpus linguistics and neurolinguistics. Chapters in Part III explore specific linguistic phenomena such as slurs, interjections, honorifics, and metaphor, while those in Part IV show how the concept of expressivity is valuable in domains beyond traditional linguistic boundaries, including in pedagogy, law, and music. Finally, Part V presents a cross-linguistic perspective, revealing how expressivity manifests differently across a range of languages, from French and German to Japanese and Mandarin. Providing critical surveys of existing research as well as new insights and innovative perspectives, The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity will be an indispensable resource for linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists.
Full Product Details
Author: Daniel Gutzmann (Professor of German Linguistics, Professor of German Linguistics, Ruhr University Bochum) ,
Katharina Turgay (Associate Professor of German Linguistics, Associate Professor of German Linguistics, Ruhr University Bochum)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 18.00cm
, Height: 6.00cm
, Length: 25.50cm
Weight: 1.855kg
ISBN: 9780198869450
ISBN 10: 0198869452
Pages: 1344
Publication Date: 30 December 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Author Information
Daniel Gutzmann is Professor of German Linguistics at Ruhr University Bochum. His research explores phenomena at the interface between semantics, pragmatics, and syntax and he is a leading expert on expressives. Alongside his two OUP monographs Use-Conditional Meaning (2015) and The Grammar of Expressivity (2019) he has also (co-)authored three textbooks and co-edited several volumes, including the five-volume Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics (Wiley, 2021). Katharina Turgay is Associate Professor of German Linguistics at Ruhr University Bochum. Her wide-ranging work explores syntax and morphology, pedagogical linguistics and language acquisition, and semantics and pragmatics. The main focus of her current research is the study of slurs, expressivity, and secondary meaning. Her publications include articles in a variety of journals, two monographs, a textbook, and, as co-editor with Daniel Gutzmann, Secondary Content (Brill, 2019).
