I-IV -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- Europe's sociolinguistic unity, or: A typology of European dialect/standard constellations -- From phonetic similarity to dialect classification: A principled approach -- Inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: A usage-based account of the adjectival inflection -- Interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects -- Substitutions in epistolary forms of address in the seventeenth century Dutch standard variety -- LOVE in words: Experience and conceptualization in the modern English lexicon of LOVE -- On the role of semasiological profiles in merger discontinuations -- The ANGER IS HEAT question : Detecting cultural influence on the conceptualization of ANGER through diachronic corpus analysis. -- Development and motivation of marked plural forms in German -- Not arbitrary, not regular: The magic of gender assignment -- Future time reference: English and Dutch compared -- Cleft constructions in French and Spanish -- How to express indifference in Germanic: Towards a functional-typological research programme -- The lexicalization of speech act evaluations in German, English and Dutch -- Index