This introduction is a synopsis of the major trends in linguistics discussed in Part III (seventeen chapters).

Part IIIA (late nineteenth century -- 1960s) describes the decline of comparative studies, the rise and culmination of structuralist and descriptive synchronic linguistics, and the different currents in Europe and North America (four chapters).

In Part IIIB (1960s-2000, ‘recent history,'a time of considerable growth in linguistic scholarship, thirteen chapters), the following topics are considered:

• - the rise, development and impact of formal linguistics (i.e., generative approaches to syntax, semantics and phonology, and alternatives) as well as formal and non-formal cognitive approaches;

• - the turn to language use and function: new modes/tools of linguistic inquiry (methods, corpora and lexicography, technology); functionalist reactions to formalism (e.g., pragmatics, American functionalism, systemic functional linguistics); language as a communicative spoken activity (conversation analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, critical approaches to language use);

• - new interdisciplinary subfields: sociolinguistics (variational sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, language policy and planning), anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics;

• - historical linguistics (language change, grammaticalization), contact linguistics, pidgins and creoles, approaches to universal-typological linguistics;

• - applied linguistics (language teaching/learning, interdisciplinarity).

The conclusion discusses the editors’ sense of the direction of theoretical developments in linguistics since the 1960s: the general movement towards contextualization.

This chapter argues that it will make results of variationist studies more relevant for linguistic theory if internal predictors assumed to constrain syntactic variation are operationalized in a way that explicitly relates them to semantic or – more broadly – functional hypotheses. We use word order in Danish adverbial subordinate clauses as a case study for how a hypothesized semantic difference between variants can be operationalized. This word order alternation concerns the relative placement of sentential adverbials and finite verbs in subclauses. While the variable is structurally well defined (Adverb < Verb vs. Verb > Adverb), it challenges classic theoretical and methodological ass+L13umptions in variationist studies by entailing a semantic difference, since the two word orders convey subtly different meanings when used in subclauses. For this study, we operationalize a set of linguistic predictors related to the two most prevalent meaning hypotheses given in the literature, the assertivity and the foregrounding hypothesis. Mixed-effect models and random forest analyses are used to examine the effects and strength of intra- and extralinguistic (social) predictors. Geographical differences related to social stratification indicate an ongoing standardization process emanating from the capital of Copenhagen. The import of our findings related to linguistic theory is discussed.

This chapter sets the scene for the book by surveying the terrain of academic linguistics. Issues connected to language teaching and the place of grammar in language teaching are situated with respect to different fundamental concepts in linguistics and the influence these have had on the development of teaching methodologies. The idea of grammatical concepts as an approach to developing language awareness among language learners is introduced and illustrated on the basis of data from a range of languages.