The 23rd UWM Linguistics Symposium (1996) brought together linguists of opposing theoretical approaches — functionalists and formalists — in order to determine to what extent these approaches really differ from each other and to what extent the approaches complement each other. The two volumes of Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics contain a careful selection of the papers originally presented at the symposium.

This volume, which emerged from a workshop at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 conference held at KU Leuven in July 2008, contains a collection of papers which investigate the relationship between synchronic gradience and the apparent gradualness of linguistic change, largely from the perspective of grammaticalization. In addition to versions of the papers presented at the workshop, the volume contains specially commissioned contributions, some of which offer commentaries on a subset of the other articles.

The study of languages in contact is an ever-relevant topic in linguistics, especially at present times when increasing globalization leads to a number of new contact situations. This volume features ten papers on various aspects of language contact by leading specialists in the field. In these papers, contact-induced change in a wide variety of languages is approached from various perspectives, reflecting the current state of affairs in language contact studies.

This collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks.

This volume contains papers on general issues of language change, as well as specific studies of non-Germanic languages, including Romance, Slavonic, Japanese, Australian languages, and early Indo-European. A second volume, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, contains papers on Germanic.