Biographical note

Kersti Börjars is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester and Professor (II) of Nordic Languages at Oslo University. Her current research focuses on syntactic description and analysis and on linguistic change. She has taught courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels on English grammar, syntactic theory and diachronic linguistics. She has held grants to study linguistic change in Pennsylvania German (ESRC) and for a study of the English possessive (AHRC). She is editor of the Journal of Linguistics and co-author (with Kate Burridge) of Introducing English Grammar (2010). Rachel Nordlinger is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stanford University in 1997. Nordlinger's research centres around the description and documentation of Australia's Indigenous languages, and their implications for syntactic and morphological theory, working within the framework of lexical-functional grammar. Louisa Sadler is professor of Linguistics at the University of Essex, where she has taught courses at graduate and undergraduate level on syntactic theory (lexical-functional grammar – LFG and Head-driven phrase structure grammar – HPSG), the description of English, semantics, argument structure, morphology, PROLOG and computational linguistics. She has been involved in a number of research projects using LFG with a number of languages, including Welsh, Archi and Portuguese. Her current research interests centre on LFG, syntax and its interfaces to morphology and semantics and the grammatical description of the Arabic vernaculars, including Maltese. She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for research on Arabic syntax.