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.

Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. An Adaptive Approach to Grammar; 3. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures; 4. Categorial Grammar; 5. Cognitive Grammar; 6. Embodied Construction Grammar; 7. Sign-Based Construction Grammar; 8. Corpus-Based and Corpus-Driven Analyses of Language Variation and Use; 9. Default Semantics; 10. Dependency Grammar and Valency Theory; 11. An Emergentist Approach to Syntax; 12. Formal Generative Typology; 13. A Frames Approach to Semantic Analysis; 14. Framework-Free Grammatical Theory; 15. Functional Discourse Grammar; 16. Grammaticalization; 17. Lexical-Functional Grammar; 18. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach to Linguistic Analysis; 19. Minimalist Linguistics; 20. Morphological Analysis; 21. Optimality Theory in Phonology; 22. Optimization Principles in the Typology of Number and Articles; 23. The Parallel Architecture and its Place in Cognitive Science; 24. Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Theory of Conversational Implicature; 25. Probabilistic Linguistics; 26. Linguistic Relativity; 27. Relevance Theory; 28. Role and Reference Grammar as a Framework for Linguistic Analysis; 29. The Analysis of Signed Languages; 30. Simpler Syntax; 31. Systemic Functional Grammar and the Study of Meaning; 32. Usage-Based Theory; 33. Word Grammar