Acknowledgements

We wish to thank a number of people and institutions for contributing to this book in various ways.

First of all, we are grateful to the general editor of the Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today series, Elly van Gelderen, as well as to Kees Vaes, Esther Roth and Ymke Verploegen from John Benjamins publishers, for believing in our project and for responding so quickly and competently to all our queries.

Thanks also to the University of Bergen and to UiT The Arctic University of Norway for financial support which made it possible for us to meet physically to work on the book.

Special thanks go to James A. Berry for his constructive review and helpful feedback, to Leah Bauke for joining us naturally (Bauke, Haumann & Killie 2022) as well as for her feedback on phase-related issues, and, last but not least, to Matthias Eitelmann (he knows why).

Thanks also to the audiences at the following venues: Summer School on Historical Linguistics of Germanic Languages SUM-UP in Potsdam (2018), Language Change in English and Beyond: Linguistic Theory and Historical Corpora, Athens (2019), Linguistic Colloquium, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (2019), 42. DGfS Annual Meeting in Hamburg (2020), Language Data and Language Change research group, Bergen (2024).

Finally, we thank each other for our dedication to this project, for visits to exhibitions and concerts, and for friendship, all of which made the writing process so much more enjoyable.