Description: A state-of-the-art view of present-day linguistic typology, focussing on universal tendencies across the world's languages and variation within individual categories.
Brief description: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Australian Laureate Fellow, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre James Cook University, Australia. She is an expert on languages and cultures of Amazonia and the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, in addition to linguistic typology, general linguistics and several other areas. Recipient of Humboldt Researcgh Award. Major publications include A grammar of Tariana (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and, with Oxford University Press, Classifiers: a typology of noun categorization devices (2000), Language contact in Amazonia (2002), Evidentiality (2004), The Manambu language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, (2008), Imperatives and commands (2010), Languages of the Amazon (2012), The Art of Grammar (2015) and How gender shapes the world (forthcoming 2016); the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Review Quotes: 'Edited by two of the world's leading typologists, this Handbook enables the reader to access a wealth of information on language structures far beyond those that have been covered in previous typological work.' Bernd Heine, Universität zu Köln