This book focuses on how gender in its many guises - Linguistic, Natural, Social - is reflected in human languages, how it features in myths and metaphors, and the role it plays in human cognition. Examples are drawn from all over the world, with a special focus on Aikhenvald's extensive fieldwork in Amazonia and New Guinea.

• Acknowledgements


• Abbreviations and conventions


• List of boxes, figures, schemes, and tables


• 1: The multifaceted Gender


• 2: Linguistic Gender and its expression


• 3: Round women and long men: Physical properties in Linguistic Gender


• 4: What are Linguistic Genders good for?


• 5: Gender meanings in grammar and lexicon


• 6: The rise and fall of Linguistic Genders


• 7: Manly women and womanly men: The effects of gender reversal


• 8: The images of gender


• 9: When men and women speak differently


• 10: The rituals of gender


• 11: Gender in grammar and society


• 12: The heart of the matter: Envoi


• References


• Index of languages, linguistic families, and peoples


• Index of authors


• Index of subjects

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003) and The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008; paperback 2010), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American and Papuan languages and typological issues including evidentials, classifiers, and serial verbs. Her other recent publications with OUP include Imperatives and Commands (2010), Languages of the Amazon (2012; paperback 2015), The Art of Grammar (2014), and How Gender Shapes the World (2016).
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is a Distinguished Professor and Research Leader at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. Her books include Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002), Evidentiality (2004), The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (2008), Imperatives and Commands (2010), The Languages of the Amazon (2012), and The Art of Grammar (2014), all published by OUP.