Bernd Heine is Emeritus Professor at the Institut für Afrikanistik, University of Cologne. He has held visiting professorships in Europe, Eastern Asia (Japan, Korea, China), Australia, Africa (Kenya, South Africa), North America (University of New Mexico, Dartmouth College), and South America (Brazil). His 33 books include Possesson: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization (CUP, 1997); Auxiliaries: Cognitive Forces and Grammaticalization (OUP, 1993); Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (OUP, 1997) (with Tania Kuteva); World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (CUP, 2002); Language Contact and Grammatical Change (CUP, 2005); The Changing Languages of Europe (OUP, 2006), and The Evolution of Grammar (OUP, 2007); and with Heiko Narrog as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (OUP, 2011), and The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (OUP, 2012).

Tania Kuteva is a Full Professor of English Linguistics at the Heinrich‐Heine‐University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Apart from a number of articles in international journals, she has also published two books with Cambridge University Press and three with Oxford University Press on grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical typology, and language evolution, of four of which she is co‐author with Bernd Heine. She is on the Editorial Board of Studies in Language.