The present book is the revised version of my PhD thesis that I submitted and
defended in 2006 at Philipps-University Marburg. First and foremost, I wish to
express my deep gratitude to my dissertation director Rüdiger Zimmermann for
interesting me in the topic and supervising this dissertation, but also for his academic
teaching, support and encouragement throughout the years. Next, I would
like to thank my co-director Richard Young for being my sponsor during my
research scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His constructive
criticism and challenging comments have proved to be essential for carrying this
project forward. Thanks also to his family for their hospitality. I also want to thank
Ingo Plag for hiring me as a student assistant years ago, and for initiating my interest
in empirical linguistic research in the first place.
A number of people have provided very helpful (e-mail) comments, suggestions,
and advice at various stages of this project: Betty Birner, Mia Boström
Aronsson, Monika Doherty, Paul Hopper, Gunther Kaltenböck, Terence Odlin,
Clive Perdue, Paul Rayson, David Smith, and Gregory Ward. I also acknowledge
the valuable and insighful comments of two anonymous reviewers for John Benjamins.
I am grateful to all of them for letting me benefit from their expertise. Of
course, they are not responsible for any errors and shortcomings of this work.