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.

• 1: Eva van Lier: IntroductionPart I. Fundamental issues2: Martin Haspelmath: Word class universals and language-particular analysis3: Walter Bisang: Levels of analysis and word classes (root, stem, word)4: Kasper Boye: Lexical versus functional words5: Andrej L. Malchukov: Transcategorial operations6: William A. Foley: Word class systems and other grammatical propertiesPart II. Theoretical approaches7: Yoad Winter: Word classes in Formal Semantics8: Cristiano Broccias: Word classes in Cognitive Grammar9: Evelien Keizer: Word classes and gradience10: J. Lachlan Mackenzie: Lexeme classes and word classes in Functional Discourse Grammar11: William Croft: Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar12: Hedde Zeijlstra: Word classes in Minimalist Syntax13: Jan Don: Lexical categories in Distributed Morphology14: Frank Van Eynde: Word classes in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar15: Mary Dalrymple and Ida Toivonen: . Word classes in Lexical Functional GrammarPart III. Specific word classes16: Alexander Letuchiy: Verbs17: Jan Rijkhoff: Nouns18: David Beck: Adjectives19: Kees Hengeveld: Adverbs20: Borja Herce: Adpositions21: Holger Diessel: Demonstratives22: Mark Dingemaanse: Ideophones23: Mark Dingemaanse: InterjectionsPart IV. Word classes in genetic and areal language groups24: Elsa Oréal and Martine Vanhove: Word classes in Egyptian, Semitic, and Cushitic (Afroasiatic)25: Denis Creissels: Word classes in Mande languages26: Dana Louagie: Word classes in Australian languages27: Paolo Ramat: Word classes in Indo-European languages28: Walter Bisang: Word classes in classical Chinese (Sinitic)29: Donna B. Gerdts and Lauren Schneider: Word classes in Salish languages30: Karen Michelson: Word classes in Iroquoian languages31: Marianne Mithun: Word classes in Eskimo-Aleut languages32: Valentina Vapnarsky: Word classes in Mayan languages33: Françoise Rose: Word classes in Maweti-Guaraní languages34: Pieter Muysken: Word classes in Quechuan languages35: Ulrike Mosel: Word classes in Austronesian languages36: Marian Klamer: Word classes in Timor-Alor-Pantar and the Papuan region37: Vadim Kimmelman and Carl Börstell: Word classes in sign languagesPart V. Word classes in linguistic sub-disciplines38: Natalia Levshina: Word classes in corpus linguistics39: Aaron K. Smith: Word classes and grammaticalization40: Sabine Stoll: Word classes in first language acquisition41: Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers: Word classes in second language acquisition42: Yaron Matras and Evangelia Adamou: Word classes in language contact43: Paul Ibbotson: Word classes in psycholinguistics44: David Kemmerer: Word classes in neurolinguistics46: Meladel Mistica, Ekaterina Vylomova, and Francis Bond: Word classes in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence

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.