Five long years ago, we met to plan what looked like an impossibly ambitious project J this Handbook. Since then, we have met in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt; we have exchanged hundreds of e-mails; we have read and commented on dozens of chapters J and we have found the time to write our own. The work on this Handbook has been challenging at times but it has also been inspiring and rewarding. We have learned a lot.

Obviously, a project of this size would have been impossible without the help and encouragement of others. We are therefore grateful to the people and organizations that supported our work on this Handbook. First of all, we wish to express our gratitude to the section editors, who assisted us in providing feedback to authors and in getting the chapters into shape: Onno Crasborn (section I), Josep Quer (section III), Ronnie Wilbur (section IV), Trude Schermer (section VII), Adam Schembri (section VIII), and Myriam Vermeerbergen (section IX). As for the content and final shape of the chapters, we are indebted to all the publishers who granted us permission to reproduce figures, to Nancy Campbell, our meticulous, reliable, and highly efficient editorial assistant, and to Sina Schade and Anna-Christina Boell, who assisted us in the final check of consistency and formatting issues as well as in putting together the index J a truly cumbersome task. It was a true pleasure to cooperate with the professional and supportive people at Mouton de Gruyter. We are indebted to Anke Beck for sharing our enthusiasm for the project and for supporting us in getting the ball rolling. We are very grateful to Barbara Karlson for guiding and encouraging us throughout the process. Her optimism helped us to keep up our spirits whenever we felt that things were not going as smoothly as we hoped. After talking to her, things always looked much brighter. Finally, we thank Wolfgang Konwitschny for his assistance during the production phase. Bencie Woll’s work on the handbook has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (Grants RES-620-28-6001 and 6002), Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL). Roland Pfau’s editorial work was facilitated thanks to a fellowship financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG) in the framework of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg-August-University, Göttingen.