Acknowledgments

The editors and authors of this book would like to express their deep gratitude to those who made this edition come to life: Professor Merja Kytȍ (Uppsala University), the series editor, for thoroughly reading the manuscript and giving us a positive response and very constructive recommendations, and Helen Barton, Commissioning Editor, Language and Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, for being so enthusiastic and supporting our project from the very beginning of its proposal. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers of the proposal whose suggestions made this book much better and more comprehensible. We deeply and sincerely thank the very first readers of our book proposal – Professor Roland Sussex (University of Queensland, Australia) and Larry Smith, who, tragically, has not lived to see this book out of press. We are also indebted to our colleague Tatyana Dobrosklonskaya, Professor of Lomonosov State University of Moscow, for granting us permission for her poem to be included as an epigraph to the volume. And our heartfelt thanks go to the IAWE members, the discussions and talking with whom stimulated us to write this book.