Book excerpt: The three volumes of Language typology and syntactic description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense; aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized u=in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.