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:	9780191669330
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	06/25/2015
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	960
File size:	26 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

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
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?