David G. Gil is professor of social policy and director of the Center for Social Change, The Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University.

Martin Haspelmath is Senior Scientist at the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an Honorary Professor at the University of Leipzig. After studies in Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo, and Moscow, he received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin in
1993. Before moving to Leipzig in 1998, he held teaching positions in Berlin, Bamberg, and Pavia, and he has taught at summer schools in Albuquerque, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Cagliari and at MIT. His research interests are in comparative, diachronic, and theoretical morphology and syntax. He is the author
of A Grammar of Lezgian (1993), Indefinite Pronouns (1997), and Understanding Morphology (2002) and co-editor of Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook (2 vols, 2001).
Matthew S. Dryer received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Michigan. After ten years at the University of Alberta, he came to the University at Buffalo in 1989 where he is Professor of Linguistics. He has held visiting positions at UCLA, the University of Oregon, the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His primary research interest is in typology and syntax. Since 1983 he has been working on a project establishing a large cross-linguistic database on word order and related
typological characteristics. His other research interests include discourse, pragmatics, American Indian languages (particularly Kutenai), and Papuan languages. Since 2001 he has been engaged in joint field research with Lea Brown on two languages of Papua New Guinea, Walman (in the Torricelli
family) andPoko-Rawo (in the Sko family).
David Gil has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology since 1998. He graduated from UCLA in 1984 and held positions at the University of Washington, the University of Tel Aviv, the University of Haifa, the National University of Singapore, and
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur). His interests are in syntactic, semantic, and phonological typology, as well as Malay/Indonesian and other Southeast Asian languages. He is the head of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute, and has more recently also worked on language
acquisition and the relation between language structure and thought.
Bernard Comrie is Director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara. His main interests are language universals and typology, historical linguistics
(including in particular the use of linguistic evidence to reconstruct aspects of prehistory), linguistic fieldwork, and languages of the Caucasus. Publications include Aspect (1976), Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (1981, 2nd edn 1989), The Languages of the Soviet Union (1981), Tense
(1985), The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century (with Gerald Stone and Maria Polinsky, 1996). He is also editor of The World's Major Languages (1987), co-editor (with Greville Corbett) of The Slavonic Languages (1993), and managing editor of the journal Studies in Language.