摘要：The majority of the papers collected in this special issue were presented at the Workshop on referential hierarchies in three-participant constructions, held at Lancaster University in May 2011. Two papers ¨C on Yakima Sahaptin by Joana Jansen and on Araki by Alexandre Fran.ois ¨C were not presented at the workshop, but originated in the same context: a research project on referential hierarchies in three-participant constructions, carried out by the workshop organizers: Anna Siewierska and myself, the guest editor of the current issue. It was with great sadness that we, the authors of the papers collected here, heard of Anna's sudden death in a car accident in Vietnam, on August 6th2011, just a few months after we had convened in Lancaster. I wish to dedicate this special issue to the memory of Anna, who was the principle investigator of the project that inspired its creation. I also wish to thank Lindsay Whaley, the editor of Linguistic Discovery, for giving me the chance to complete this issue in Anna's honor. The project on referential hierarchies in three-participant constructions is part of a larger project on Referential Hierarchies in Morpho-Syntax (RHIM), which is in turn one of the EuroBABEL projects funded by the European Science Foundation. The EuroBABEL initiative promotes empirical research on endangered languages, with the aim of advancing our knowledge of linguistic structure in general. The funding of the workshop in Lancaster by the EuroBABEL organization is gratefully acknowledged
