Acknowledgements There are a number of people and organisations without whom this book would not have been possible. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation in Germany, who generously funded a one-year Research Fellowship during 2000–2001 (ref. IV GRO 1066520 STP), which was spent at the Institut fu¨r deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim and during which time the primary research was under- taken. I would also like to thank Ulrike Meinhof (Southampton), Martin Durrell (Manchester) and Philip Payne (Lancaster) for their support in obtaining this fellowship, as well as the many colleagues at the IDS for their help, not least Professor Dr Gerhard Stickel, Dr Klaus Heller, Dr Wolfgang Mentrup, Dr Annette Trabold, Karin Laton, together with Eva Teubert and her colleagues in the excellent library there. Thanks also to Dr Ricarda Wolf and Professor Dr Jannis Androutsopoulos for not only listening to my many excursions on the German spelling reform, but for providing a roof over my head as well as good wine and company on numerous occasions during that year. As this book was largely completed while I was still working in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University, there are many colleagues and friends there to whom I am indebted. I would especially like to thank Bob McKinlay, Tony McEnery and Francis Katamba for making it possible for me to take up the Hum- boldt fellowship, as well as the Faculty of Social Sciences for supporting a further trip to Mannheim in June 2003. My gratitude also extends to Marjorie Wood, the postgraduate administrator in the Department of Linguistics, whose generosity of support freed up many hours for me to continue working on this book between 2001 and 2003. Also within the Department of Linguistics, I would like to thank various colleagues who read draft chapters and/or commented on talks I gave on this vi Acknowledgements vii topic, not least Mark Sebba, Jane Sunderland, John Heywood, Susan Dray, Roz Ivanic˘, David Barton, Uta Papen, Juliane Schwarz and Stephanie Suhr. Other individuals outside Lancaster who offered their help at various stages include Chris Young (Cambridge), Stephen Barbour (East Anglia) and Lucy Macnab (Leeds). Special thanks go to Oliver Stenschke (Go¨ttin- gen) and Frank Finlay (Leeds) for (almost) voluntarily ploughing their way through drafts of the whole manuscript and making many insightful suggestions for improvement, and to Jo Jackson for help with printing. Thanks also to Alison Phipps, the reviewer for Multilingual Matters, for her equally constructive comments. Although it would be all too easy to blame any shortcomings of this book on others, the usual caveats apply ... Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to Mike and Marjukka Grover at Multilingual Matters for being supportive publishers with rea- listic deadlines, and to Frank and Ben for just being there – even when I was not. Author’s Note Following the completion of the manuscript for this book, a number of developments took place in the summer of 2004 in relation to the reform of German orthography, the contents of which could no longer be incorporated into the body of the text. In accordance with the Fourth Interim Report of the Zwischenstaatliche Kommission fu¨r deutsche Rechtschreibung, a number of recommendations for minor modifications to the new orthographic guidelines were approved at the 306th plenary meeting of the German Ministerpra¨sidenten in June 2004. The main features of the revisions are as follows: . no further new spellings to be introduced such as ÃTopp (by analogy with Tipp or Stopp); . the concept of main and subordinate variants to be abandoned in the case of foreign loans (both forms will be considered equally valid until such time as preferences are clarified by popular usage, e.g. Ketschup/Ketchup or Spagetti/Spaghetti); . a relaxing of the rules regarding separate and compound spellings allowing both variants in a number of controversial cases such as leidtun/Leid tun (to feel sorry for) or gewinnbringend/Gewinn bringend (profitable). viii Acknowledgements These and other changes are outlined in detail in a special issue of Sprachreport edited by Klaus Heller and published by the Institut fu¨r deutsche Sprache in July 2004. (Both the Fourth Interim report and the special issue of Sprachreport are available at www.ids-mannheim.de/ service.) Finally, in August 2004, all newspapers published by the Axel-Springer Verlag together with Der Spiegel and the Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung opted to revert to their own in-house versions of the old orthography (for details see, inter alia, Bastian Sick “Aus Neu macht alt” in Spiegel Online at www.spiegel.de, 6 August 2004). At the time of writing, there is ongoing debate regarding the possible need to extend the interim period for the reform’s introduction that is currently scheduled to end on 31 July 2005. Sally Johnson, Leeds, September 2004.