Dagmar Divjak is a Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, UK. Born in Belgium, she obtained her BA, MA and PhD degrees at the University of Leuven, one of the leading centres for cognitive linguistics and quantitative corpus methods. After postdoctoral stints in the US (UNC – Chapel Hill) and Sweden (Stockholm University), she moved to the UK to take up a position as Lecturer. In January 2019 she joined the University of Birmingham as Professorial Research Fellow and is working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience.

Among other duties, she is Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Linguistics, co-edits De Gruyter’s Cognitive Linguistic Research book series, and is the author of a number of books and edited volumes, including her 2019 book on Frequency in Language which appeared with Cambridge University Press.

Dirk Geeraerts is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Leuven. He studied Germanic languages (Dutch and English), and also holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He received his PhD from the University of Leuven in 1981.

From 1977 to 1985, he worked at the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie in Leiden (The Netherlands). After an interlude at the department of Dutch of the University of Leiden, he taught Dutch linguistics at the Kortrijk campus of the University of Leuven from 1986 to 1993. Since 1993 he taught theoretical linguistics in Leuven, where he founded the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics at the turn of the millennium.