<!doctype html public «-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en»> http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859–1"> The volume advances our understanding of the role of scales and hierarchies across the linguistic sciences. Although scales and hierarchies are widely assumed to play a role in the modelling of linguistic phenomena, their status remains controversial, and it is these controversies that the present volume tackles head-on.