Frederick J. Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington and Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He specializes in syntactic theory and the history of linguistics, and is interested in particular in whether the work of functional linguists is compatible with, challenges, or refutes mainstream thinking in generative grammar. He has been President of the Linguistic Society of America and an editor of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and his many publications include the OUP volumes Possible and Probable Languages: A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology (2005) and Measuring Grammatical Complexity (co-edited with Laurel B. Preston; 2014; paperback 2017).