This work examines grammatical relations and their role in linguistic change. The topics of syntactic or morphosyntactic change and the related methodological questions are approached from different theoretical perpectives of generative grammar, valency grammar and functionalism.

1. Preface; 2. Introduction (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 3. How far does semantic bleaching go: About grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories (by Abraham, Werner); 4. 'Oblique subjects', structural and lexical case marking: Some thoughts on case assignment in North Germanic and German (by Askedal, John Ole); 5. The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 6. Towards personal subjects in English: Variation in feature interpretability (by Gelderen, Elly van); 7. Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures (by Harris, Alice C.); 8. Recasting Danish subjects: Case system, word order and subject development (by Heltoft, Lars); 9. Ergative to accusative: Comparing evidence from Inuktitut (by Johns, Alana); 10. Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics (by Miller, D. Gary); 11. The loss of lexical case in Swedish (by Norde, Muriel); 12. The coding of the subject-object distinction from Latin to Modern French (by Schosler, Lene); 13. Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure (by Veerman-Leichsenring, Annette); 14. Index