Emergence of a large corpus of written texts for some languages has enabled quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of the synchronic conditions for diachronic changes, over both long and short spans of time. This title presents studies on synchronic and diachronic variations based on such corpus data.

1. Message from the President (by Kameyama, Ikuo); 2. Center for Corpus-based Linguistics and Language Education (by Minegishi, Makoto); 3. Introduction (by Kawaguchi, Yuji); 4. The Atlas Linguarum Europae: A diachronic analysis of its data (by Viereck, Wolfgang); 5. Variationism and underuse statistics in the analysis of the development of relative clauses in German (by Ludeling, Anke); 6. Variation and change in the Montferrand Account-books (1259-1367) (by Lodge, R. Anthony); 7. Cognitive aspects of language evolution and language change: The example of French historical texts (by Raible, Wolfgang); 8. The importance of diasystematic parameters in studying the history of French (by Schosler, Lene); 9. The reorganisation of mood in the epistemic subsystem - The case of French belief predicates in diachronic dynamics (by Becker, Martin); 10. French liaison in the 18th Century - Analysis of Gile Vaudelin's texts (by Kawaguchi, Yuji); 11. Issues in the typographic representation of medieval primary sources (by Emiliano, Antonio); 12. An analysis of the misuse of the participle in old Russian texts (by Onda, Yoshinori); 13. A preliminary analysis of Arabic derived verbs in the Leeds Quran Corpus - With special reference to Stem III (CaaCaC) (by Ratcliffe, Robert R.); 14. On the narrow and open "e" contrast in Santali (by Minegishi, Makoto); 15. The classification of Apabhramsa - A corpus-based approach of the study of Middle Indo-Aryan (by Yamahata, Tomoyuki); 16. Changes in the meaning and construction of Polysemous words: The case of mieru and mirareru (by Shiba, Ayako); 17. Language change from the viewpoint of distribution patterns of standard Japanese forms (by Yarimizu, Kanetaka); 18. Index of proper nouns; 19. Index of subjects; 20. Contributors