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: 17.10cm , Height: 5.60cm , Length: 24.60cm
Weight:   1.666kg
ISBN:  

9780199641604

ISBN 10:   0199641609
Pages:   886
Publication Date:   25 June 2015
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

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

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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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