Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and
spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world …

Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale develop an approach to language change
based on construction grammar. Construction grammar is a theory of signs construed at the …

This book provides a readable and clearly articulated introduction to an important area in the
broader field of Cognitive Linguistics. Taking as its starting point the categorization of colour …

During communication, speakers commonly rotate their forearms so that their palms turn
upward. Yet despite more than a century of observations of such palm-up gestures, their …

Geert Booij's popular textbook on the structure of words has been revised and updated in a
third edition. The book covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of …

This book investigates noun phrases in a representative sample of the world's 6,000 or so
languages and proposes a semantic model to describe their underlying structure in any …

This book explores the wide variety of cases in which the plural of nouns is lexical. When a
plural is lexicalized it becomes part of what it is to know a certain word: pence, for example …

Complex Words in English presents a comprehensive account of present-day word
formation in English. Starting with a discussion of some basic issues, including the definition …

Building upon the model of Semantic Maps (Haspelmath 2003), which typologists have
designed mainly for grammatical semantics, this chapter discusses methodological issues …

A 2015 James Beard Award Finalist:" Eye-opening, insightful, and huge fun to read."—Bee
Wilson, author of Consider the Fork Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good …