Oxford Handbook of Gender and Classifiers

This handbook offers a detailed account of grammatical gender and classifiers, two closely related linguistic phenomena that are used to subcategorize the nominal system in many languages of the world. The contributors draw on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages and approach the topic from a range of different perspectives. In the first part, chapters summarize current theoretical research in the field, as well as suggesting new ways to analyse the relevant lexico-syntactic features. Part II turns instead to the substantial body of research on the acquisition of gender and classifier systems in different language families, while chapters in Part III explore the representation and processing of these systems, including coverage of code-switching and language processing in aphasia. Both these parts feature examples and data not only from Indo-European languages but also from under-represented and endangered languages. The final part of the volume presents a broad typological overview of gender and classifier systems across the world, with examples from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Classifiers will be a valuable resource for researchers and scholars in morphosyntax, typology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience of language.

Niels O. Schiller is Chair Professor of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. His area of expertise is language production, more specifically the representation and processing of lexico-syntactic features such as grammatical gender and classifiers during noun phrase production. He is also interested in morphological and phonological encoding during speech production, and his experimental work mostly makes use of behavioural and electrophysiological methods. He is the co-editor, with Greig I. de Zubicaray, of The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics (OUP 2019), and has published extensively in a wide range of journals in the field. Tanja Kupisch is Professor of Linguistics at Lund University. Her research explores various dimensions of multilingualism, including multilingual L1, L2, and L3 acquisition and bilectalism. She is particularly interested in minority languages and links to diachronic change, and she is a member of the Cluster of Excellence 'The Politics of Inequality', where she contributes research on linguistic inequality. She is the co-editor of the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and her publications include Language Policy and Language Acquisition Planning (co-edited with Maarja Siiner and Francis Hult; Springer 2019) and Formal Linguistics and Language Education (co-edited with Andreas Trotzke; Springer 2020).