The students' edition of Mannheim papers in multilingualism, acquisition and change publishes high quality theses on the topics of multilingualism, acquisition and change written in close connection with current research projects of the chair of Anglistik/Linguistik (Diachronie) and submitted and defended at the University of Mannheim as well as outstanding theses on these topics submitted by students from other universities. With this first and special edition we take account of these

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... papers submitted over the past years, specifically those connected to the current DFG-project Borrowing of Argument Structure in Contact Situations (henceforth BASICS, 2015(henceforth BASICS, -2021. The theses published in this special edition all deal with aspects of borrowing of argument structure in contact situations and are thus related to the eponymous DFG-project of the institute. More precisely, BASICS investigates grammatical change in the medieval language contact situation between English and French which arose after the Norman Conquest (1066 until ca 1500). The domain of research consists of structural borrowing phenomena and their connection with the lexicon: massive borrowing of lexical items with a predicate-argument structure is hypothesised to have favoured and produced grammatical changes. Therefore, the phenomenon in focus is the borrowing into medieval English of French verbs and the question of how their argument structure has influenced its grammar. By taking into account lexicalsemantic theories, findings about language acquisition and the sociolinguistic background, the project provides new insights into the process of structural borrowing, and into how to distinguish internal from contact-induced language change. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons "Attribution 4.0 International" license.