Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where her PhD thesis Syntactic Change and Causation: Developments in Infinitival Constructions in English was accepted in 1990. She is a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (CUP 1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (CUP 2000), and co-editor of Form Miming Meaning and Pathways of Change (Benjamins 2000 and 2001).