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.

Full Product Details

Author:   John R. Taylor
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.00cm , Height: 4.50cm , Length: 24.40cm
Weight:   1.502kg
ISBN:  

9780198808633

ISBN 10:   0198808631
Pages:   886
Publication Date:   17 August 2017
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
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.

Table of Contents

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

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Author Information

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.

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