Michael Cysouw is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin and affiliated to the Department of English at the Free University of Berlin. This book is a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, which was written at the Department of General Linguistics of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The Association for Linguistic Typology prized this dissertation with its 2001 junior award.