Acknowledgements

The truth is I have benefited, more or less directly, from the advice and scholarship of far too many people to mention them all here. Yet, at the risk of forgetting someone, I would like to extend special thanks to (in alphabetical order): Andrea Nini, Anna Fankhauser, Carolyn Blume, Dirk Siepmann, Douglas Biber, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Janna Gerdes, Larissa Goulart, Luke Tudge, Martin Becker, Martin Schweinberger, Muhammad Shakir, Natalia Levshina, Peter Thwaites, Peter Uhrig, Stefan Gries, Stephanie Evert, Susanne Flach, Tatjana Winter, Thomas Prinzie, Ute Römer, and the developers and maintainers of all the open-source software that I have used as part of this project.

I am genuinely grateful to the editor of this series, Ute Römer, and to an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. This book is a considerably reworked version of Chapters 1–3 and 7–8 of my doctoral thesis. As such, the long and rather more emotional acknowledgments of my thesis (Le Foll 2022c: ix–x) very much also apply here.