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The Oxford Handbook of the Word

Online ISBN:
9780191756696
Print ISBN:
9780199641604
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of the Word

John R Taylor (ed.)
John R Taylor
(ed.)
Linguistics, University of Otago
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John R Taylor (PhD 1979) is senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Otago, New Zealand; previously he was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of Trier, Germany. His interest in Cognitive Linguistics dates from the 1980s, when, after having completed his doctoral thesis on acoustic phonetics, he chanced upon a preprint of some chapters of Langacker's Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. He is author of Linguistic Categorization (1989; 2nd ed., 1995; 3rd rev. ed., 2003; and translated into Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Polish), Possessives in English (1996), and Cognitive Grammar (which appeared in 2003 in the Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics series). He has also coedited two volumes: Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (with Robert MacLaury, 1996) and Current Approaches to Lexical Semantics (with Hubert Cuyckens and René Dirven, 2003). Since 1996, he has been one of the editors (alongside Ronald Langacker and René Dirven) of the series Cognitive Linguistics Research, published by Mouton de Gruyter. His main research interests are lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and phonetics/phonology in a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. John R Taylor can be reached at [email protected].

Published online:
13 January 2014
Published in print:
25 June 2015
Online ISBN:
9780191756696
Print ISBN:
9780199641604
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The word is central to both naïve and expert theories of language. Yet the definition of word remains problematic. The 42 chapters of this Handbook offer a variety of perspectives on this most basic and elusive of linguistic units. Topic ranges from the presentation of words in works of reference (dictionaries and thesauri), the statistical properties of words in text (frequency and length distributions), the internal structure of words, their categorization into parts of speech, and their role in theories of phonology, syntax, and semantics. Also addressed are multi-word units, the dynamic relation between words and their neighbours, the structure of vocabularies, and the ways in which words and vocabularies change over time. Separate sections are devoted to the representation of words in the mental lexicon, their acquisition (by first language learners and in second language pedagogy), and the distinctive properties of names. Words are the objects of games, and a chapter is devoted to the ways in which the various properties of words are exploited in the ever popular pastime of the cryptic crossword puzzle. A final chapter emphasises the elusiveness, and persistence, of this linguistic category. Written by experts, but with an eye on the general reader, the book will appeal not only to professional linguists, but also to a wider audience, in fact to anyone who shares a fascination with words.

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