Biographical note

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. She is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge, 2000), with Wim van der Wurff, Ans van Kemenade and Willem Koopman. She is also the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007) and a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge, 1992). Hendrik De Smet is a BOF (Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds) Research Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation (2012) and co-editor of On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change (2015). Wim van der Wurff is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge, 2000), with Olga Fischer, Ans van Kemenade and Willem Koopman. He is also co-author of Colloquial Bengali (2009) with Mithun B. Nasrin.