1 Introduction

The traditional picture of describing elliptical galaxies as simple isothermal bodies which are chemically well mixed has dramatically changed. Ellipticals are now seen as complex systems from the photometrical, kinematical and chemical point of view. The properties of ellipticals are found to correlate with their mass (Burstein et al. 1997). Large ellipticals are triaxial systems supported by anisotropic velocity distributions of the stars. Low-luminosity systems are on the contrary generally axisymmetric rotationally supported bodies.

One of the most noteable features observed in ellipticals are kinematically decoupled core components. The most extreme cases are peculiar cores which are characterized by angular momentum vectors which are opposite or perpendicular with respect to the main body of the galaxy. Merging seems to be a plausible explanation for the origin of the decoupled component. This is also supported by the fact that the metallicities of the core component as measured through the absorption line indices appear to be enhanced with respect to the rest of the galaxy (Bender & Surma 1992). In about 30% of the nearby luminous ellipticals peculiar core kinematics are detected. Taking however projection effects into account, it is estimated that more than 50% of all luminous ellipticals should contain a kinematically decoupled core (Bender 1996).

In order to study the stellar kinematical properties of ellipticals in a homogenous manner, we carried out a spectroscopic study of a sample of 53 southern ellipticals. In the following section we summarize the observations and data reduction. In Sect. 3 we present the results obtained by application of the fourier fitting method as described by van der Marel & Franx (1993). The correlations between global photometric and kinematic properties are discussed in Sect. 4. Finally we discuss some conclusion on the merging history of the class of elliptical galaxies which can be drawn on the basis of the sample.