The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes

Eva van Lier is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD from the same institute in 2009 with a typological study of word classes and dependent clause constructions. Later, she authored and (co-)edited several publications on (flexible) word classes, especially in Oceanic languages, including Flexible Word Classes: Typological Studies of Underspecified Parts of Speech (with Jan Rijkhoff; OUP 2013). She has also worked on the typology of ditransitive verbs, action nominalizations, and noun incorporation, and is currently leading a project about alternating verbs across languages.

This book-or rather, some portion of it!-should be required reading for anyone working on language documentation, syntax, morphology or lexicography. In my opinion, this recommendation should hold particularly for those linguists working within theories that assume innate grammatical categories, who might be persuaded to reconsider that decision, or at least consider why there is so much variation in categories across languages. Those working in other subfields of linguistics may find much to think about here as well.

• 1: Eva van Lier: Introduction Part I. Fundamental issues 2: Martin Haspelmath: Word class universals and language-particular analysis 3: Walter Bisang: Levels of analysis and word classes (root, stem, word) 4: Kasper Boye: Lexical versus functional words 5: Andrej L. Malchukov: Transcategorial operations 6: William A. Foley: Word class systems and other grammatical properties Part II. Theoretical approaches 7: Yoad Winter: Word classes in Formal Semantics 8: Cristiano Broccias: Word classes in Cognitive Grammar 9: Evelien Keizer: Word classes and gradience 10: J. Lachlan Mackenzie: Lexeme classes and word classes in Functional Discourse Grammar 11: William Croft: Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar 12: Hedde Zeijlstra: Word classes in Minimalist Syntax 13: Jan Don: Lexical categories in Distributed Morphology 14: Frank Van Eynde: Word classes in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar 15: Mary Dalrymple and Ida Toivonen: . Word classes in Lexical Functional Grammar Part III. Specific word classes 16: Alexander Letuchiy: Verbs 17: Jan Rijkhoff: Nouns 18: David Beck: Adjectives 19: Kees Hengeveld: Adverbs 20: Borja Herce: Adpositions 21: Holger Diessel: Demonstratives 22: Mark Dingemaanse: Ideophones 23: Mark Dingemaanse: Interjections Part IV. Word classes in genetic and areal language groups 24: Elsa Oréal and Martine Vanhove: Word classes in Egyptian, Semitic, and Cushitic (Afroasiatic) 25: Denis Creissels: Word classes in Mande languages 26: Dana Louagie: Word classes in Australian languages 27: Paolo Ramat: Word classes in Indo-European languages 28: Walter Bisang: Word classes in classical Chinese (Sinitic) 29: Donna B. Gerdts and Lauren Schneider: Word classes in Salish languages 30: Karen Michelson: Word classes in Iroquoian languages 31: Marianne Mithun: Word classes in Eskimo-Aleut languages 32: Valentina Vapnarsky: Word classes in Mayan languages 33: Françoise Rose: Word classes in Maweti-Guaraní languages 34: Pieter Muysken: Word classes in Quechuan languages 35: Ulrike Mosel: Word classes in Austronesian languages 36: Marian Klamer: Word classes in Timor-Alor-Pantar and the Papuan region 37: Vadim Kimmelman and Carl Börstell: Word classes in sign languages Part V. Word classes in linguistic sub-disciplines 38: Natalia Levshina: Word classes in corpus linguistics 39: Aaron K. Smith: Word classes and grammaticalization 40: Sabine Stoll: Word classes in first language acquisition 41: Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers: Word classes in second language acquisition 42: Yaron Matras and Evangelia Adamou: Word classes in language contact 43: Paul Ibbotson: Word classes in psycholinguistics 44: David Kemmerer: Word classes in neurolinguistics 46: Meladel Mistica, Ekaterina Vylomova, and Francis Bond: Word classes in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence