Leofranc Holford-Strevens writes:

The nature and the manifestations of case are the subject of the new Oxford Handbook; anyone who wishes to understand the phenomenon of case from any point of view will find something of interest in its 57 chapters (not counting the introduction) by 62 authors or co-authors. The breadth of treatment will be apparent even from the titles of the seven parts into which the book is divided: ‘Theoretical Approaches to Case’; ‘Morphology of Case’; ‘Syntax of Case’; ‘Case in (Psycho)linguistic Disciplines’; ‘Areal and Diachronic Issues’; ‘Individual Cases: Cross-Linguistic Overviews’; ‘Sketches of Case Systems’. To make sense of the whole, readers would have to be familiar with a plethora of technical terms, not all of which are explained, and abbreviations, not all of which are expanded; what f-structures and c-structures are the profane must find out for themselves. It is not evident why some languages are the focus of whole chapters and others merely furnish examples, even if, like Finnish and Hindi/Urdu, they are cited by several contributors. But such things are inevitable in multi-author volumes not written to a formula.

(LRB 9 July 2009)

Oxford | hardback 928 pp. |ISBN: 9780199206476