Contributors' Column

Charles F. Meyer is professor of applied linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is author of English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002) and coeditor (with Anne Curzan) of the Journal of English Linguistics.

Daniel Long received his doctorate from Osaka University in 1995 and is currently associate professor of Japanese linguistics at Tokyo Metropolitan University, where he teaches language acquisition and sociolinguistics. He is the editor of Ogasawara-gaku Kotohajime (An introduction to Ogasawara studies; Kagoshima: Nanposhinsha, 2002) and coeditor of Ogasawara Handobukku (Ogasawara handbook; with Makoto Inaba, Kagoshima: Nanposhinsha, 2004) and the forthcoming Ogasawara Kotoba Shaberu Jiten (Talking dictionary of the Bonin Islands; with Naoyuki Hashimoto, Kagoshima: Nanposhinsha). He is also a research fellow in the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Peter Trudgill is professor of English at the German-French bilingual University of Fribourg in Switzerland. His most recent book, New Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2002), is about New Zealand English and the lessons that can be deduced from it regarding the origins of other colonial varieties of English, including North American English.

Heidi Harley is assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her primary research interests are in syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, and she has published articles on these topics in Language and Linguistics Inquiry.

Carol L. Russell earned her M.A. in English from Kansas State University in 2002. She currently teaches expository writing for the English Department there. The present article stems from the work she did for her final master's project and is dedicated to the many "show people" in previous generations of her family.

Thomas E. Murray is professor of English at Kansas State University, where he teaches courses having to do with linguistics and the English language. He has published extensively on a wide variety of topics in American English and language variation; his forthcoming book, edited with Beth Lee Simon, is Language Variation and Change in the American Midwest: A New Look at "Heartland" English (Amsterdam: Benjamins).