Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen is Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the University of Manchester. She holds a PhD and Higher Doctorate in French Linguistics from the University of Copenhagen, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2013. She is the author of The Function of Discourse Particles: A Study with Special Reference to Spoken Standard French (Benjamins, 1996), and Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues (Elsevier/Brill, 2008) and of numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of French grammar, linguistics, and pragmatics, from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view.