JONATHAN CULPEPER is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK. His research interests include stylistics, pragmatics, and (the history of) the English Language. His publications include History of English (Routledge, 1997), Exploring the Language of Drama (Routledge, 1998, co-edited with Mick Short and Peter Verdonk), Language and Characterisation in Plays and Other Texts (2001) and research collected volume Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002).

FRANCIS KATAMBA is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK. His research interests are in the areas of English phonology and morphology, including morphological and phonological theory. His publications include An Introduction to Phonology (1989), English Words (1994) and Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, 3rd editions (with William O'Grady and Michael Dobrovolsky, 1997)

PAUL KERSWILL is Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK. His areas of research and interest include social dialectology, language variation and change, and English accents and dialects. His publications include Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway (1994) and Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages (2005).

RUTH WODAK is Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK. She has published widely in critical discourse studies, on issues of identity politics, of exclusion and inclusion and of social and political changes.

TONY McENERY is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Lancaster, UK. His research interests in English corpus linguistics as well as corpus linguistics applied to languages other than English. He has wide experience of editing and authoring, and is currently editor of three book series, Advances in Corpus Linguistics (Routledge), Empirical Linguistics (EUP) and Routledge Frequency Dictionaries (Routledge).