The new book series of Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute of German Language, IDS) offers a platform for comparative research on chosen aspects of German linguistics, especially with regard to their typological relevance. It includes both monographs and edited volumes, in English and in German, on topics such as grammar (phonology, graphemics, morphology, syntax, semantics), lexis, pragmatics, second-language acquisition, multilingualism and language contact. All publications are innovative contributions to the description of the linguistic phenomena in question, but also to the theoretical foundations of their respective fields. They all have successfully gone through a peer-review process. The series is published on behalf of the IDS and edited by Prof. Eva Breindl (Professor of Germanic Linguistics with special focus on 'German as a foreign language' at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Dr. Lutz Gunkel (Research Associate in the Grammar Department of the IDS Mannheim). From 2016 on, the volumes published in this series are freely available via Open Access.