R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University, Cairns Campus. He has published grammars of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), of Jarawara (OUP, 2004), and of several Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), as well as Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (CUP, 2002), and Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (OUP, 2015; paperback 2020). His theoretical contributions include The Rise and Fall of Languages (CUP, 1997), the magisterial three-volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (OUP, 2010-12), and Are Some Languages Better than Others? (OUP, 2016; paperback 2018). He has also published on his native language, with A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (2nd edition; OUP, 2005), Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (OUP, 2014), The Unmasking of English Dictionaries (CUP, 2018), and the present volume.