27/3/2016 Martin Hilpert et al. (eds.), New Trends in Nordic and General Linguistics. Linguae et litterae 42 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015... http://nome.unak.is/wordpress/volume-11-no-1-2016/02_book-review/martin-hilpert-et-al-eds-new-trends-nordic-general-linguist... 1/6 Martin Hilpert et al. (eds.), New Trends in Nordic and General Linguistics. Linguae et litterae 42 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015)  Book review linguistics, Nordic countries Matteo Tarsi After a long absence from the linguistics conference circuit, another International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL) was organised in 2012. 1. Introduction The conference, the main idea of which was to “revive a broken tradition” (p.1), was organised at the Albert- Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (April 18th-20th 2012)[1] . The organisers were: Peter Auer, Janet Duke, Martin Hilpert, Christine Merztlufft, Jan-Ola Östman and Michael Rießler. The next conference (ICNGL 12) will take place in Helsinki in 2016. A selection of the papers presented at the conference is now available in the volume #42 of the Publications of the School of Language and Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). The aim of the present review is to provide the reader with a useful synoptic view of the contents of the book (§2) toghether with a more general evaluation of the various research trends as they are presented in the book (§3). 2. The book and its contents The book opens with a general introduction by the editors (pp.1-8), in which they present the conference, the tradition behind it, the structure of the book and its contents. The papers are thematically organised in five sections: (1) Language contact, (2) Phonology, (3) Morphosyntax, (4) Syntax and (5) Grammaticalization. According to the editors’ own words (p.2) “the contents of the book mirror the diversity […] experienced at the conference, and that characterizes Nordic linguistics in the early twenty-first century”. “Nordic” must here be understood in its original broad sense, with respect to Europe. In fact the languages about which research is presented in the book are not just the Scandinavian ones. Broad space is also given to the Finno-Ugric languages of the European North, such as Sámi and Mari, which, for obvious reasons, are of great interest even if one looks just at the geographical region of Scandinavia. In the next following subsections a view of each section of the book (2.1-2.5) is given. 2.1 Language contact This section, the topic of which was the main conference theme in Freiburg, is the largest of the entire book, as it contains four articles. Kurt Braunmüller (“Competing tendencies in Germanic pronominal and deictic systems: The most general principle will prevail”, pp.11-27) discusses the interferences of the pronominal and deictic systems in Germanic, with a special focus on mainland Scandinavian. His main argument is that the L2 acquisition process by adults is of fundamental importance when doing research on language contact. This view gives in fact a viable method of explaining some more or less obscure linguistic phenomena. To illustrate this he quickly sketches  