Preface

Summary

This book grew out of an earlier paper, ‘Accessing the lexicon in language contact’, and took a long time in getting conceived. Once I had realised that all the material I wanted to cover could not conceivably be crammed into a single paper the actual planning became much easier, and then it was just a question of keeping the manuscript to a manageable size. Countless people commented on earlier versions of the material presented here, at conferences, summer schools, and seminars at Szeged, Groningen, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Nijmegen, Düsseldorf, and Girona, and at a lecture at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam. Given my own research background, it should come as no surprise that the topic of language contact figures quite prominently in this book.

Much of the material for this book grew out of the research that I could do with the support of the Spinoza Prize 1998 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO. In particular I am grateful to the people in the research team in Nijmegen on the languages of Bolivia and Rondonia, Mily Crevels, Swintha Danielsen, Rik van Gijn, Katja Hannss, Katharina Haude, and Hein van der Voort, and to Simon Musgrave and Marian Klamer who worked on the SCALA typology database. Margot van den Berg and Adrienne Bruyn commented on the pidgin and creole chapter, and Anna Fenyvesi commented extensively on an earlier draft of the article version.