The papers in this book were presented at the Symposium on Grammaticalization held inLeiden 1995, with the exception of the paper by Tabor and Traugott. This collection of 11 papersdeals with a variety of cases of language change that do not fit perfectly into the models ofgrammaticalization as a unidirectional process by which open-class elements are weakened andbecome part of the closed-class set. Briefly described case studies in a variety oflanguages—from Romance, Germanic, and South East Asian languages to Ancient Greek,Hittite, Basque, and others—allow the reader to peer through the overwhelming number offactors and interactions among factors involved in language change. At the same time, one canalso examine the struggle to define and determine which facts do and do not belong to the realmof grammaticalization. To illustrate some of the issues addressed in this book, I will brieflydescribe some of the papers.