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In this introductory paper we discuss the expanding focus of lexical borrowing research over the past decade. Where this 'inevitable' outcome of language contact was originally predominantly addressed from a historical linguistic and lexicographic perspective, a broader range of linguistic traditions have recently been applied to the topic, each introducing their own questions, perspectives and methods. Below, we first present the main insights ensuing from a century of loanword research. Then, we introduce the viewpoints that characterize more recent work and the questions they foreground. In presenting the contributions to this special issue, we finally pay specific attention to the way the six papers add to the broader tendencies and innovations of current lexical borrowing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper outlines the different trends and movements that have in recent years led to a marked increase in the number of linguistic studies that combine a construction-based theoretical outlook on grammar with a dedicated interest in issues of synchronic and/or diachronic language variation. In addition, it gives an overview of the papers included in this thematic issue and links them with broader tendencies in the fields of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experimental answer to a question which has remained controversial since it was put on the agenda in the Romantic era: is beauty individually or communally determined? Applied to our research topic, accent variation in spoken Netherlandic Standard Dutch, this question should be rephrased as: is the perceived beauty of regional accents of Dutch in the eye of the beholder, or is it entrenched in the communal attitudes towards these varieties? Listener-judges rated the audio-taped speech of eight speakers representing four regional accents on traits pertaining to four evaluative dimensions, viz. integrity, dynamism, competence and status, but also on a separate scale pertaining to how beautiful or ugly the speech was found. The experiment reported here confirms prior experimental work which demonstrated that the beauty scale correlated with all the evaluative dimensions inherent in the ratings. This overarching and synthesizing function of the perceived beauty of speech suggests a communal rather than an individual origin of aesthetic perception in the field of language attitudes. We therefore concur with Van Bezooijen (2002) that beauty perceptions afford privileged and convenient access into language attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]