• ISBN13: 9780199544004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: August 16, 2010
• Pages: 1048
• Original Price: GBP 105.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 1900 grams

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand.

Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interaction between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure.

Bernd Heine is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of African Studies (Institut für Afrikanistik), University of Cologne. His thirty three books include Possession: Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization (CUP, 1997); Auxiliaries: Cognitive forces and grammaticalization (OUP, 1993); Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (OUP USA, 1997); with Derek Nurse, African Languages: An introduction (CUP, 2000), A Linguistic Geography of Africa (CUP, 2007); and with Tania Kuteva, World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (CUP, 2002), Language Contact and Grammatical Change (CUP, 2005), The Changing Languages of Europe (OUP, 2006). Heiko Narrog is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies of Tohoku University. He holds two PhDs in linguistics in Germany and Japan, and his publications include Japanische Verbflexive und flektierbare Suffixe (Harrassowitz 1999) as well as numerous articles in linguistic typology, semantics and language change, and Japanese linguistics. He is currently involved in a typological project on semantic maps and is preparing the publication of a book on modality and the hierarchy of functional categories.