Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His publications include Small Clauses in English: The Nonverbal Types (1992), The Verb in Contemporary English (edited with Charles F. Meyer, 1995), English Syntax and Argumentation (1997/2001), Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English (with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis, 2002), and Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader (edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova, 2004). With David Denison and Richard Hogg, he edits the journal English Language and Linguistics.

April McMahon is Forbes Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Understanding Language Change (1994), Lexical Phonology and the History of English (2000), Change, Chance, and Optimality (2000), An Introduction to English Phonology (2002), and Language Classification by Numbers (with Robert McMahon, 2005).