This unique three-volume survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world’s languages Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts of speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and deixis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each new concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and field workers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Most of the chapters in the second edition are substantially revised or completely new, some on topics not covered by the first edition. Volume I covers parts-of-speech systems, word order, the noun phrase, clause types, speech act distinctions, the passive, and information packaging in the clause.