This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes across a wide range of contemporary linguistic theories, such as Cognitive Grammar, Minimalist Syntax, and Lexical Functional Grammar, while the focus of Part III is on individual word classes, from major categories such as verb and noun to minor ones such as adpositions and ideophones. Part IV provides a number of cross-linguistic case studies, exploring word classes in families including Afroasiatic, Sinitic, Mayan, Austronesian, and in sign languages. Chapters in the final part of the book discuss word classes from the perspective of various sub-disciplines of linguistics, ranging from first and second language acquisition to computational and corpus linguistics. Together, the contributions showcase the importance of word classes for the whole discipline of linguistics, while also highlighting the many ongoing debates in the areas and outlining fruitful avenues for future research.
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
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.
