1. Contributor's addresses; 2. Preface; 3. Language contact and language change in Amazonia (by Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.); 4. Grammaticalization and the historical development of the genitive in Mainland Scandinavian (by Askedal, John Ole); 5. Beyond the comparative method? (by Campbell, Lyle); 6. The transition from early to modern Portuguese: An approach from historical sociolinguistics (by Carvalho, Maria Jose); 7. Isomorphism and language change (by Conradie, C. Jac); 8. From purposive/future to present: Shifting temporal categories in the Pilbara languages of north west Western Australia (by Dench, Alan); 9. The formation of periphrastic perfects and passives in Europe: An areal approach (by Drinka, Bridget); 10. The grammaticalization of movement: Word order change in Nordic (by Faarlund, Jan Terje); 11. Paths of development for modal meanings: Evidence from the Finnic potential mood (by Forsberg, Hannele); 12. On degrammaticalization (by Heine, Bernd); 13. Process inhibition in historical phonology (by Honeybone, Patrick); 14. Reconsidering the canons of sound-change: Towards a 'Big Bang' theory (by Janda, Richard D.); 15. Case in Middle Danish: A double content system (by Jensen, Eva Skafte); 16. The development of some Indonesian pronominal systems (by Kikusawa, Ritsuko); 17. Morphological reconstruction as an etymological method (by Koch, Harold); 18. Labovian principles of vowel shifting revisited: The short vowel shift in New Zealand English and Southern Chinese (by Chun-fat, Lau); 19. Conventional implicature and language change: The cyclic evolution of the emphatic pronouns in Romanian (by Manoliu, Maria M.); 20. The rise of IPs in the History of English (by Osawa, Fuyo); 21. From subject to object: Case studies on Finnish (by Pekkarinen, Heli); 22. Meaning change in verbs: The case of strike (by Riemer, Nicholas); 23. Borrowing as a tool for grammatical optimization in the history of German brand names (by Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke); 24. Pragmatic relevance as cause for syntactic change: The emergence of prepositional complementizers in Romance (by Schulte, Kim); 25. Early Nordic language history and modern runology: With particular reference to reduction and prefix loss (by Schulte, Michael); 26. On the interpretation of early evidence for ME vowel-change (by Stenbrenden, Gjertrud Flermoen); 27. On the reflexes of Proto-Germanic ai: The spellings ie, ei and ey in Middle Dutch (by Reenen, Pieter van); 28. Index