Robert Stockwell is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles. He is co-editor of Linguistic Change and Generative Theory (with R. Macaulay, 1972), co-author of Major Syntactic Structures of English (with Paul Schachter and Barbara Partee, 1973) and author of Foundations of Syntactic Theory (1977). Donka Minkova is Professor of English Language at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely in the fields of English and Germanic historical phonology and syntax, historical dialectology and English historical metrics. She is the author of The History of Final Vowels in English (1991).