This book assembles contributions dealing with language contact and areal linguistics. The goal of the book is to investigate linguistic convergence in Europe with a strong focus on the languages of Eastern Central Europe which show many remarkable similarities. The focus is put on a methodical and empirical component in the investigation of two or more languages in the context of possible language contact phenomena. Languages of Eastern Central Europe and adjacent parts of Europe use a considerable amount of common vocabulary due to the transfer of loanwords during a long period of cultural contact. But they also share several grammatical features-phonological, morphological and syntactic ones. This book tackles lexical and grammatical phenomena in language contact situations. The authors take up diachronic, synchronic and language acquisitional perspectives, and discuss methodological problems for the field.

The book contains ten papers discussing issues of the relation between syntax and morphology from the perspective of morphologically rich languages including, among others, Indo-European languages, indigenous languages of the Americas, Turkish, and Hungarian. The overall question discussed in this book is to what extent morphological information shows up in syntactic structures and how this information is represented. The authors adopt different theoretical frameworks such as the Derivational Theory of Morphology, Distributed Optimality, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Lexical Decomposition Grammar combined with Linking Theory and OT-like constraints, Paradigm-Based Morphosyntax as well as the Principles and Parameters Approach of Generative Grammar.

Formal Slavic Linguistics stands for explicit descriptions of Slavic languages considering all linguistic levels and interfaces. The authors of this volume apply recent formal models in linguistics and demonstrate their descriptive accuracy and explanatory power. The authors investigate issues in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics as well as phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and morphological aspects of Slavic languages, applying recent formal models in linguistics (such as Minimalism, Optimality theory, HPSG, formal semantics). Contents: Phonetics - Phonology - Information Structure - Semantics - Computational Linguistics - Morphology - Lexicon - Argument Structure. The Editors: Gerhild Zybatow is professor of Slavic linguistics at the Slavic Department at the University of Leipzig. Uwe Junghanns, Grit Mehlhorn, and Luka Szucsich hold research and teaching positions at the University of Leipzig. In 1995, the editors called into being FDSL - the European forum for the formal description of Slavic languages. The FDSL-conferences take place biannually in Leipzig and Potsdam.