Acknowledgements

This book, a revised version of my PhD thesis, could not have been written without the input and encouragement of many people. First of all I want to thank my supervisor Kristin Davidse for taking me on first as an MA student and later as a PhD researcher, when I was appointed on the FWO-Flanders Research Foundation project grant G.0560.11, of which Bert Cornillie was the co-promoter. I thank both my supervisors for their detailed and constructive feedback, which stimulated me to think through my arguments and elaborate my own approach. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Gerard O’Grady who introduced me to the study of prosody, both instrumental and auditory.

I am very grateful to a number of other people for their careful comments on the manuscript and their help with the publication process. In their capacity as members of my doctoral examination board, Jean-Christophe Verstraete and Gisle Andersen provided valuable suggestions. Karen Axelsson generously gave much appreciated comments on my PhD thesis. As acquisition editor of John Benjamins, Kees Vaes offered friendly advice and guidance. Elena Tognini-Bonelli and Ute Römer, the series editors of Studies in Corpus Linguistics Series, kindly accepted the manuscript for review. Jonathan Culpeper, who chose to break his anonymity as reviewer, made many helpful suggestions for revision. Any errors which remain are, needless to say, entirely mine.

Thanks must also go to Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis, Knut Hofland, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi for making the corpus data analysed in this book available to me, and to Wim Van der Elst for getting me started in R and for his advice on statistics.

Writing this book has been both demanding and gratifying, and I am grateful to have received invaluable support and advice from a number of linguists and researchers at various stages in the writing process: Hendrik De Smet, Steven Schoonjans, Peter Dirix, Wendy Elvira-García, Koen Jaspaert, Liesbet Heyvaert, Pedro Gras Manzano, Lise Fontaine, Bert Oben, Caroline Gentens, Natalia Pericchi, Sol Sansiñena, Katrien Verveckken, Frauke D’hoedt, Stef Spronck, Nikki van de Pol, Liisa Deth Theilgaard, Gunell Tottie, Sebastian Hoffmann, and Donka Farkas.

To my family and friends, I must express my gratitude for their time and encouragement, and for bringing me happiness.

Through the process of writing this book Johnny and my children, Manno and Aloxe, have been an invaluable support and it is to them that I dedicate this book.