This volume includes a typological introduction, plus revised versions of ten of the sixteen presentations at the International Workshop on ‘Word’, held at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, 7–12 August 2000. An earlier version of chapter 1 had been circulated to contributors, to ensure that the detailed studies of ‘word’ in individual languages were cast in terms of the same typological parameters.

All of the authors have pursued intensive investigations of languages, some of them little-known in the literature. They were asked to write in terms of basic linguistic theory – the cumulative framework in which most descriptive grammars are cast – and to avoid formalisms (which come and go with such frequency that any statement made in terms of them will soon become dated and inaccessible).

This volume comes from the third International Workshop organised by the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology. The first, held in 1997, gave rise to the book Changing valency: case studies in transitivity (edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald), published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. The second, held in 1998, resulted in the volume Areal diffusion and genetic relationship: problems in comparative linguistics (edited by Aikhenvald and Dixon), published by Oxford University Press in 2001.