Marta Degani is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. She holds a doctorate in English Studies from the University of Venice and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Macquarie University, Australia. She has researched extensively on the variety of New Zealand English, focusing on phenomena of linguistic and cultural contact between English and Maori. She has also worked on semantic and pragmatic aspects of English modality and published on issues of subjectification as a phenomenon of language change and (inter)subjectivity in verbal communication. She currently has two research foci: the analysis of political discourse in the frameworks of cognitive semantics and discourse analysis, and the study of bilingualism and biculturalism in the context of Aotearoa/ New Zealand.

Paolo Frassi is Associate Professor of French Language and Linguistics at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, Italy. His main research interests include lexicology, lexicography and language teaching. In particular, his studies concern lexicographical definitions, lexicographical metalanguage, metalexicography, vocabulary teaching for French L2 learners, and phrasemes. He collaborates with the RLF project (Réseau Lexical du Français) at the ATILF-CNRS Laboratory of Nancy, in which he attempts to model lexicographical definitions of adjectives.

Maria Ivana Lorenzetti is Assistant Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. She received a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2006. Her main research interests are in the domains of political discourse, the syntax-semantics interface, textual analysis, cognitive linguistics, and translation.