The end of an era! Our contribution to Non-Canonical English Syntax, edited by Sven Leuckert & Teresa Pham and published by Cambridge University Press, caps off many years of productive collaboration with Heidrun Dorgeloh from the University of Düsseldorf on syntactic variation, non-canonical syntax, and genre, a collaboration that has produced conference workshops, joint presentations, several co-written articles, a co-edited book, and, our favorite, a truly jointly written textbook. In our note on co-authorship for CUP, we wrote:
“We love working together as a team. We have co-organized workshops, co-authored research articles, co-edited a book, and now we have co-written a textbook. Over the years, we have developed a solid rhythm of writing and reviewing each other’s work. With a co-author, there is always a first highly engaged audience for everything one writes, which is great. However, with the many moving pieces that a textbook has (chapters, charts, illustrations, exercises, an index, a glossary, model answers), many more than a research article, we would not recommend picking a textbook as the first major co-authored project two people should undertake.”
I consider myself very lucky to have been able to develop a research partnership over many years. My new research project, Bad Grammar in the Digital Age, takes a different direction, and, as excited as I am about the project, I already miss the collaborative practice!