Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my dear friend Juliane House, to whom this book is dedicated. Juliane’s and her late husband Willis Edmondson’s thoughts have deeply influenced my view of ritual and language, and I would have never been able to finish this book without all the support and care I have received from Juliane over those five years during which the manuscript of this book was being prepared. Juliane and I spent many hours online where we not only discussed serious work but also madly laughed and quarrelled – and having such a time made it real fun to formulate the ideas of this book!
I am also grateful to the various Reviewers and the Clearance Reader who helped me enormously to improve the quality of the present manuscript. I am indebted to Helen Barton at Cambridge University Press who is the best Editor one can ever wish for. I am also grateful to Isabel Collins at Cambridge University Press for all her support. I would also like to say thank you to all those colleagues at Dalian University of Foreign Languages who contributed to the birth of this book, including Emily Fengguang Liu, as well as various of my previous and present PhD students, including (in alphabetical order) Lin Jiao, Shiyu Liu, Wenrui Shi, Yulong Song, Zongfeng Xia and Sen Zhang. I am also grateful to Tamás Váradi and Réka Dodé at the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics for all their support.
On an institutional level, I would like to acknowledge the funding of the National Excellence Programme of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (grant number: TKP2021-NKTA-02). This grant, which is the continuation of another one (Momentum Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, grant number LP2017/5) provided funding to conduct the present research. The above grants have been hosted by the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.
Last but definitely not the least, I am indebted to my family: Keiko, Naoka, Zita, András and Eszter, as well as Koma. Thank you all for bearing with me while I spent those many hours in front of my computer.
