I-VIII -- Introduction: Historical linguistics as a transdisciplinary field of research -- A. Changing believes, diversifying worlds, and flexible meanings -- Words and concepts in time: Towards diachronic cognitive onomasiology -- The semantic structure of lexical fields: Variation and change -- khalîfa - A word study -- Words in discourse - On the diachronic lexical semantics of discours -- Β. The meaning of meaning change -- Theoretical concepts in flux: Conceptual knowledge and theory change -- Meaning change as character change -- Meaning change in conceptual Montague semantics -- C. The force of grammar -- Tense in time: The Greek perfect -- Light verbs in Urdu and grammaticalization -- Bilingualism and linguistic interference in the Slavic-Romance contact area of Molise (Southern Italy) -- Lexical-grammatical variation and development: The use of conjunctions as discourse markers in everyday spoken German -- Subject index -- Author index