One must hope that more scholars from a diversity of theoretical backgrounds will follow the example of this volume and undertake comparable analyses of continuity, variation and contrast at the level of two or three families: these studies prove, if needed, that combining variational and contrastive stances is a highly productive way to deconstruct crucial syntactic phenomena that are too often taken for granted.
Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. The principal focus of his current research is a monograph on syntactic change in French, and he has ongoing projects on Venetian and on contact-induced changes in Romance languages. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance,
was published by OUP in 2019, and he is the co-editor of the OUP volumes Rethinking Verb Second (with Rebecca Woods; 2020) and Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (with Martin Maiden; 2020).
Christine Meklenborg is Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. She specializes in Medieval French but in recent years has also been working on medieval Germanic languages, especially Old Swedish. From 2014 to 2019 she was Principal Investigator of the research project 'Traces of History'. She is the editor of A Micro-Perspective on Verb Second in Romance and Germanic (special edition of Linguistic Variation; Benjamins 2019) and, co-editor of
Challenging Clitics (with Hans Petter Helland; Benjamins 2013).