Acknowledgements

The research for this book originated at the University of Hamburg. Many colleagues, friends and relatives have supported me during the time of writing. I apologize for only mentioning only a few of them here.

First, I would like to express my gratitude to Susann Fischer for the many fruitful discussions, comments and overall useful advice. She made it possible for me to meet the right people at the right time, so I could discuss many details of my analysis and my data with them. Her commitment and warmth have been for me and, surely, for many others, very helpful in order to persist in academia, which is not always easy. I am also very grateful to Eric Fuß for his willingness to help and for his friendly and constructive feedback, from which this book has benefitted a lot, as well as Christoph Gabriel for his well-grounded comments and firm support.

I am particularly indebted to Hedde Zeijlstra for his inspiring comments and the discernment with which he is able to analyze complex phenomena. His contribution in many details to the theoretical part of my monograph has been of great help to me. Parts of this work have recently been presented in several workshops and conferences (Escuela de Lingüística de Buenos Aires, OLINCO, Poznań Linguistic Meeting, Romanistentag in Zurich, Workshop on Catalan Syntax and its Interfaces in Vienna). I would also like to thank the audiences at those presentations for their questions and suggestions.

Furthermore, I would like to thank the participants in the acceptability judgment task, Conx Vega for coordinating the experiment and making sure that the corpus has been consistently coded, Svenja Gottschick and Laura Golla for blind coding the corpus. A big thanks goes to Kerstin Brock for proofreading and correcting the English of this book.

Last but not least, I wish to thank all of my colleagues for their unceasing supportive words and valuable insights, especially Marina Zielke, Elisa Sorrenti, Elena Kireva, Marc-Olivier Hinzelin, Mario Navarro and Grazia Crocco. I am extremely grateful to my closest friends and my family, and, in particular, my husband Alexander. Without their patience and confidence in me, the completion of this monograph would not have been possible.