Rooryck Johan is a Professor of French Linguistics at Leiden University (1993-2019) and currently serves as Executive Director of cOAlition S and Visiting Professor at Leiden University. He holds a membership in the Academy of Europe (elected 2019) and has held academic roles at Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Louvain. Research Interests: Generative grammar, language variation in Romance/Germanic languages, core knowledge systems, and theoretical linguistics. Grants: €550,000 + €750,000 from NWO small programs; €2,000,000 Horizon project grant; €600,000 from NWO VIDI-projects (3); €200,000 for postdoc projects (5). Scientific Awards: Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship (2011-2012) Editorial Leadership: President of the Fair Open Access Alliance and Founding Editor of Glossa (320+ OA articles since 2016). Academic Service: Reviewer for NWO, FWO, NSF, CNCS, and other institutions (2003-2018).
Katalin E. Kiss is a Professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She has held academic roles including Senior Researcher (1989-2007), Associate Professor (1982-1986), and Lecturer (1979-1981) at Eötvös Loránd University, Researcher at Université de Montréal, and Lecturer at Kossuth Lajos University. Education: MA in Hungarian and English (1972), PhD in Linguistics (1979), Habilitation in Linguistics (1991), Corresponding Member of Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2007). Her research focuses on Hungarian syntax and generative syntax, leading to significant contributions in diachronic syntax and event structure funded by OTKA grants (2002-2013). She has guest lectured at Universität Stuttgart (1988) and Universität Potsdam (2006). Katalin E. Kiss has been honored with prestigious awards including the Palladium Prize, Charles Simonyi Fellowship, and Mellon Fellowship. She has served on editorial boards for journals like Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Acta Linguistica Hungarica .
Terje Lohndal is a Professor of English Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Adjunct Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He serves as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at NTNU since April 2025 and previously held leadership roles, including Vice-Dean of Research (2021-2025) and Deputy Head of Research (2015-2021). His research spans grammatical structures across languages, focusing on heritage languages, multilingualism, and language change. Lohndal’s research explores abstract grammatical rules, language mixing in multilingual contexts, and the evolution of grammatical gender in Norwegian dialects. He is affiliated with the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL) at UiT and leads the GenVAC project on gender variation in Norwegian. His recent publications analyze syntactic variation, heritage language acquisition, and morphological shifts in Norwegian dialects, emphasizing cross-linguistic influence and theoretical linguistics. Lohndal’s work bridges empirical studies with formal grammatical theory. Awarded by the Research Council of Norway (2018), Fridtjof Nansen (2018), and the Nils Klim Prize (2014), he is a member of multiple academies, including Academia Europaea (2021) and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2015).
Johan van der Auwera is a Professor of General and English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp since October 1997. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton University (2007), University of Leuven (2006), and institutions in Paris, Gothenburg, Hong Kong, Kyoto, and Bangkok. His career spans three phases: early focus on sentence semantics and pragmatics (1970s), postdoctoral work in European typology (1980s), and synthesis of semantic and typological research (1990s onward). Doctorate in Linguistics (1980) and Habilitation (1990) Training in Philosophy (Candidate 1975) His research centers on grammatical semantics, typology, and comparative linguistics, with a focus on mood, modality, negation, indefinites, and impersonals. He has contributed to areal typology and dialectology, publishing over 220 peer-reviewed works and editing 13 books. His publications span English, Dutch, French, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Scientific awards include: 2004 Presidency of Societas Linguistica Europaea Fall 2006 Francqui Chair at the University of Leuven October 2015 International Chair at Laboratoire d'Excellence, Paris
Mark Steedman is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the School of Informatics , University of Edinburgh, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research bridges Artificial Intelligence , Cognitive Science , and Computational Linguistics , with a focus on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) , Prosody and Intonation , and Temporal Semantics . He has led the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation and contributed to interdisciplinary research at the Human Communications Research Center and Centre for Speech Technology Research . Research Interests : Steedman's work explores the intersection of formal grammar, computational models, and cognitive processes. He investigates how CCG parsing can enhance semantic inference, how prosodic features improve speech processing, and the role of temporal semantics in language understanding. His projects often integrate language models with entailment graphs for question answering and dialogue systems. Scientific Awards : Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (1993) Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2002) Fellow of the British Academy (2002) Member of Academia Europaea (2006) Best Paper Awards at ACL 2023 and AACL/IJCNLP 2023 Influential Paper Award (IFAAMAS 2017) Recent Trends in Publications : His recent work emphasizes language models for semantic inference , entailment graphs in multilingual settings, and incremental parsing for brain-language interfaces. Papers address challenges in hallucination , cross-lingual transfer , and prosody-text alignment .
Mathilde Eveline Keizer is a Professor of English Linguistics: Variation and Cognition at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. She serves as both Vice-Director of Studies for English and American Studies and Deputy Head of the Department of English and American Studies, demonstrating significant leadership within the institution. Professor Keizer's educational background includes: MA in English language and literature, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1987) PhD in English Linguistics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1992) Her primary research focuses on the theoretical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar, with particular emphasis on the Noun Phrase in English and Dutch, possessive constructions, reference and predication, definiteness, English pronouns, apposition, information structure, linguistic categorization, and semi-fixed constructions. Professor Keizer leads the FunCog research group, which investigates the intersection of functional and cognitive approaches to language structure. Her work demonstrates how linguistic structures emerge from the interaction of cognitive processes and communicative needs, providing insights into the dynamic nature of language organization. Analysis of Professor Keizer's recent publications reveals a consistent focus on English syntax within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar. Her work spans noun phrase structure, partitive constructions, prepositional phrases, and adverbial modification, demonstrating the versatility of FDG in addressing diverse syntactic phenomena. A notable trend is her increasing attention to cross-linguistic comparisons, particularly between English and Dutch, which enriches our understanding of language universals and specifics. Professor Keizer has made significant contributions to the field through her extensive publication record, including authored and edited books that have shaped contemporary understanding of functional-cognitive approaches to grammar. Her work has appeared in leading linguistics journals and handbooks, establishing her as a prominent voice in theoretical linguistics. As an educator, Professor Keizer teaches courses on Functional Discourse Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, Linguistic Categorization, Fuzzy grammar, Linguistic models and approaches, The English Noun Phrase, English adjectives, English idioms, and English syntax. She has supervised numerous graduate students through thesis seminars and advanced courses in linguistics, contributing significantly to the development of the next generation of linguists. Professor Keizer leads the FunCog research group, which brings together scholars interested in the intersection of functional and cognitive approaches to language. The group focuses on empirical investigations of linguistic structures through the lens of Functional Discourse Grammar, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research methodologies that bridge theoretical linguistics with practical applications in language teaching and computational linguistics.
