The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a rapidly increasing interest in grammaticalization phenomena. Such was the number of people engaged in this branch of historical linguistics that an entire conference was dedicated to it - the New Reflections on Grammaticalization Conference, held at the University of Potsdam in 1999. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Use Wischer and Gabriela Diewald, appeared in the Typological Studies in Language series in 2002 with John Benjamins. Due to its success, a follow-up to this conference was organized by the editors of this volume at the University of Amsterdam, April 4-6, 2002, which was attended by over a hundred participants. Judging by the vast range of theoretical issues and languages covered, as well as the liveliness of the discussions, the popularity of grammaticalization studies and its significance for the field of historical linguistics looks unabated.