Bas Aarts
Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics at University College London (UCL, UK) and Director of the Survey of English Usage, an internationally renowned research centre for corpus linguistics. His research focuses on English grammar and syntax, corpus linguistics, language use and change, and the teaching of grammar. He has directed the Survey of English Usage since the 1990s. Professor Aarts has published extensively on English grammar, including influential work on syntactic gradience and English syntax. His research combines theoretical approaches to grammar with evidence from real-world language data. He has also made significant contributions to grammar education, including work on resources designed to support the teaching of English grammar in schools. A founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics, he has held leadership roles in the wider linguistics community and was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2024.
Jong-Bok Kim
Jong-Bok Kim is Professor of English Linguistics and Literature at Kyung Hee University (Seoul, South Korea), where he currently serves as Vice President for External Affairs. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University, with a dissertation on the grammar of negation. His research spans syntax, semantics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, Construction Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, with particular expertise in the grammatical structures of English and Korean. He has published extensively on topics including negation, syntactic constructions, and the syntax–semantics interface. His books include English syntax: An introduction, Syntactic constructions in English , and The syntactic structures of Korean: A Construction Grammar perspective. Professor Kim has been recognised as a Distinguished Research Fellow by the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Lotte Sommerer
Lotte Sommerer is Chair of English Linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU, Germany), a position she has held since October 2024. She is a historical and functional-cognitive linguist whose research focuses on morphosyntactic variation and language change across Present-Day, Early Modern, Middle and Old English. Her particular interests include usage-based and Cognitive Construction Grammar, diachronic Construction Grammar, grammaticalisation and constructionalisation, linguistic gradience, and the structure and development of the English NP. Professor Sommerer studied English and German at the Universities of Vienna and Toronto and received her PhD from Vienna in 2011, with research on nominal determination and the emergence of articles in Old English. She completed her Habilitation at the University of Freiburg in 2022. Her publications include work on diachronic Construction Grammar and English NPs. She is also co-editor of the open-access journal Constructions.