Halliday was trained in Chinese for war service with the British Army; studied China, taught Chinese in Britain for a number of years, then moved into linguistics, becoming in 1965 Professor of General Linguistics at University College of London.

Wolfgang Teubert is Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK.

John Clark is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Sydney and Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University.

Colin Yallop is Adjunct Professor in English at Macquarie University, an Honorary Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and Chief Editor of the "Macquarie Dictionary,"""

Janet Fletcher is Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.

Perspectives in Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics offers an introduction to words and corpus linguistics. From this foundation it explores the much wider issues that are inevitably raised but somehow marginalized in lexicology (the study of words) and corpus linguistics: how are individual words integrated into language? What are the real benefits of studying the large quantities of text now available in corpora? How do we best conceptualize meaning itself?