This volume is a birthday present. The papers of this volume have been written by linguists and honorary linguists, all of whom owe something to the celebratee, Professor László Varga, who retires on his 70th birthday. The authors are or were his students, colleagues, friends, or any combination of these. There are many other friends and colleagues who could not afford to contribute a paper, but have sent their warmest congratulations to “Laci”, as we know him.
The papers cover a wide range of topics, from phonetics to phonology, from syntax to semantics, from cognitive approaches to philosophical ones, from the history of English and of linguistics to online dictionaries, and further. The language of the contributions was not set in the call for papers; as it happens three are in Hungarian, the rest are in English, thus accessible to a wider audience.
As regards its medium, this is an experimental publication: it is not the pdf version of the papers, but html documents intended for online reading. This has advantages and disadvantages. It is a definite advantage that all web browsers will render the papers in a readable format without external help. On the other hand, not all formatting could be done in html, thus some of the papers include images for complicated graphics. It is the reader’s task to decide whether the choice of format was a good one. The editor certainly enjoyed digging up some fine points of the html+css combo. The tag clouds have been created by Tagul.
For easier reference paragraphs have been numbered, just as in this preface.☞If you do not see the numbering at the beginning of each paragraph, you may consider updating your browser. This seems necessary because no page numbers are available in this volume. We suggest that specific parts of papers should be referred to as “Author 2013: ¶23.” A BibTeX entry of the book’s data is here.