About the Contributors

ALEXANDRA Y. AIKHENVALD is Distinguished Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University, Australia. Her research focus is on the Arawak language family in Amazonia, and Amazonian and Papuan languages in general (with special focus on the languages of the Ndu family in the Sepik region), and numerous typological topics, including classifiers, genders, serial verbs, imperatives and commands, and evidentials.

LAURIE BAUER is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of over 20 books on linguistic topics, most recently Rethinking morphology (2019). He is one of the authors of The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (2013), which won the LSA's Leonard Bloomfield Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Humanities Medal.

GUIDO CORDONI earned an MSc in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bologna, Italy (2004) and then attended a Specialisation School on Animal Health, Breeding and Livestock Products submitting a thesis on The Use of Geographic Information Systems in Veterinary Medicine. After his PhD in Virology at the University of Surrey, he took successive postdoctoral positions on molecular diagnostics of animal bacterial diseases and on comparative genomics of Escherichia coli, Campylobacter, and Clostridium perfringens. In 2016, he joined Professor Longobardi's ERC project at the University of York, UK.

PAOLA CRISMA studied linguistics in Venice, Padua, Geneva, and UCLA and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT and UCLA. She is now Assistant Professor (Ricercatrice Universitaria) of English Linguistics at the University of Trieste, Italy. Her research interests and publications focus on the comparative grammar of English and Italian, nominal syntax, language acquisition, diachronic syntax, and the syntactic and phonological history of the English language.

OLGA FISCHER is Emeritus Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is a contributor to The Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (2000), and author of Morphosyntactic Change. Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007). She has edited many books and published widely in international journals and handbooks on syntactic change, grammaticalization, analogy and iconicity. She is an initiator and co-editor of the Iconicity Research Project since its start in 1997 and of the 'Iconicity in Language and Literature' series published by Benjamins.

RUSSELL D. GRAY is the Director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, and Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. His core research focuses on questions about the history of languages, cultures, and people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

SIMON J. GREENHILL is a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at Australian National University, Australia. His research investigates why and how people created the languages around us, and what they tell us about human prehistory.

CRISTINA GUARDIANO is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy. She received her PhD in Historical Linguistics from the Università di Pisa, and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UCLA. She is active in the fields of historical linguistics, formal comparative syntax, and Romance and Greek dialectology, with research reaching into Indo-European historical syntax, parametric comparison, and the morphosyntactic structure of the nominal domain.

PAUL HEGGARTY is a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany. He explores how comparative and historical linguistics should best intersect with history, archaeology and genetics, and cooperates across those disciplines to converge their different perspectives into a more coherent understanding of the human past. His interests range worldwide, but focus particularly on the origins of Indo-European, and on the indigenous civilizations of the Andes.

FRANS HINSKENS is a senior research fellow at the Department of Variation Linguistics at the Meertens Instituut (KNAW), Amsterdam, and Professor of Language Variation and Language Contact at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Netherlands. Among his main research interests are the diachronic development of sound change, ethnolectal variation, as well as the conceptual and methodological tensions between dialectology, sociolinguistics and contact linguistics on the one hand and formal linguistic theory on the other.

GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI is Anniversary Professor and Director of the International Research Centre for Linguistic History and Diversity at the University of York, UK. He has been a NATO-CNR Visiting Scholar at MIT, a Fulbright Fellow at UCLA, Directeur de Recherche Etranger (CNRS, Paris), and a Visiting Professor at Vienna, University of Southern California, Harvard, and UCLA. Longobardi was the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant 'Meeting Darwin's Last Challenge' (2012-2018), aiming at the first cross-continental mapping of gene-language correlations.

FANNY LIMOUSIN is a native LSF signer with a PhD in Linguistics from University of Paris 8 at Saint-Denis, France. She had a post-doctoral position at the Sign Language Research Center, Georgetown University from 2013 to 2016, performing LSF archival research and historical data analysis.

YARON MATRAS is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK. His interests include contact linguistics, urban multilingualism, typology, and language documentation. He has worked on dialects of Romani, German, Kurdish, and other languages, and is the founder of the Multilingual Manchester research unit that brings together research, teaching and public engagement. His books include Language Contact (2009; second edition 2019), A grammar of Domari (2012), and Romani in Britain: The afterlife of a language (2010). He is editor of the series Language Contact and Bilingualism with De Gruyter Mouton publishers.

BETSY HICKS MCDONALD is bilingual in ASL and spoken English, and is particularly interested in ASL dialectology and historical and regional dialects of ASL. She is also interested in pedagogical techniques in bilingual education. She has a PhD in Linguistics from University of Buffalo, USA. From 2011 to 2017 she was a research associate at Georgetown Sign Language Lab.

SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, USA, where he also serves on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology. His primary research area is evolutionary linguistics, focusing on the phylogenetic emergence of language, language speciation (including the emergence of creoles and pidgins), and language vitality, especially in the context of colonization, imperial expansions, and globalization.

TERTTU NEVALAINEN is Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and the Director of the VARIENG Research Unit. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, and language change. She is the author of more than a hundred scholarly articles, of Historical Sociolinguistics (with Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, 2nd edn., 2017), and An Introduction to Early Modern English (2006), and she has co-edited 15 volumes on language variation and change.

NA'AMA PAT-EL is Associate Professor of Semitic languages and linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She publishes on historical linguistics, mostly syntactic change, and language contact, primarily among related languages. She works on the languages of the ancient and modern Middle East, especially Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Akkadian.

BETTY S. PHILLIPS is Emerita Professor of English Linguistics and recipient of the Theodore Dreiser Distinguished Research Award at Indiana State University, USA. Her research has focused on the influence of word frequency on the lexical diffusion of sound change in English and its implications for theories of the lexicon.

MALCOLM ROSS is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at the Australian National University, Australia, where he taught and researched from 1986 until his retirement in 2007. His main research interests are the histories of the Austronesian and Trans-New Guinea language families, language contact, and the methodologies of historical linguistics. He is co-editor with Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond of the volumes (five to date) of The lexicon of Proto Oceanic.

TED SUPALLA is a Professor of Neurology, Linguistics, and Psychology at Georgetown University, USA, and he runs the Sign Language Research Lab. He is also the co-author (with...