Almost all languages have some grammatical means for categorizing nouns. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

Alexandra Aikhenvald has been Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University since 1994. She was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR 198089, and Professor of Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, until 1994. Her books include A Structural and Typological Classification of Berber (Moscow 19867, in 3 parts) and Modern Hebrew (Moscow 1990).