Klaus-Uwe Panther is Professor Emeritus of English linguistics at Hamburg University. His research focuses on pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, specifically the motivation of grammatical structure by conceptual meaning and pragmatic function. He has published widely on control theory (often with Klaus-Michael Köpcke), conceptual metonymy, and motivation in language, the latter resulting in two volumes co-edited with Günter Radden Metonymy in Language and Thought (1999) and Studies in Linguistic Motivation (2004). A follow-up volume on motivation is in progress. He is a past president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and the German Cognitive Linguistics Association and currently serves on the boards of these associations.

Linda L. Thornburg holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California with the dissertation Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English. She has taught at California State University, Fresno; Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Associate Professor; and at Hamburg University. Her early publications focused on the interaction of semantics, pragmatics and morphosyntactic change in Early English. More recently she co-edited with Janet M. Fuller the volume Studies in Contact Linguistics (2006).

Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg began their collaborative research in the mid-1990s; their first article, “Speech Act Metonymies”, was published in 1997. To date they have produced over 20 articles on conceptual metonymy, cognitive pragmatics (speech act constructions), cognitive morphology, grammatical constructions, and grammatical and lexical aspect. They have presented their work at conferences and invited talks throughout Europe, North America, and China. Recent publications include an edited volume Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing (2003) and the chapter on metonymy in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (2007). Coming out this year (2009) is an edited volume (with Antonio Barcelona) Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar.