Book excerpt: The Permanent International Committee of Linguists (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, CIPL) has organized the 18th Congress of Linguists in Seoul (July 21-26, 2008), in close collaboration with the Linguistic Society of Korea. In this book one finds the invited talks which address hot topics in various subdisciplines presented by outstanding and internationally well known experts. In addition, the state-of-the-art papers provide an overview of the most important research areas of contemporary linguistics.