Acknowledgments

The present volume has its origin in a workshop with the title “Language change at the interfaces: On the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure” held in Bremen (Germany) at the 41st Annual Conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, on March 6th–8th, 2019. It includes some of the papers presented at the workshop and a selection of additional papers investigating the intricate relation between interface phenomena in Germanic and Romance from a diachronic and synchronic perspective.

We are greatly indebted to the organizers of the main conference and to the program committee for giving us the opportunity to bring together an excellent group of international linguists in a productive environment and for their help and continued support before, during and after the conference.

We are very grateful to all the participants in this workshop, both the speakers for their talks and the audience for the stimulating and constructive discussions, which made this workshop a very fruitful and enjoyable event. Of course, a big thank you goes to the authors who did not take part in the workshop, but eagerly accepted our invitation to contribute a chapter to the book. This allowed us to put the focus on the intersentential and the intrasentential dimensions of language change phenomena at the interfaces.

We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to the internal and external reviewers who generously shared their expertise by providing competent and constructive feedback on each of the chapters.

It goes without saying that this volume would not have been possible without the endorsement and technical assistance of John Benjamins Publishing Company. We thank the General Editors Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen for their decision to include this book in the series “Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today”. We would also like to thank the members of the editorial staff Kees Vaes and Esther Roth for their precious cooperation and advice throughout the publishing process. Our gratitude also goes to Marta Massaia, who helped us with the preparation of the final manuscript of the volume.

We very much hope that the papers in this volume will stimulate debate among historical linguists working on the role of interfaces in language change – as well as theoreticians in general – and further research into this rapidly growing field.