Ruqaiya Hasan has taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England, America and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she has researched and published widely in the areas of stylistics, culture, context and text, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues. Jonathan Webster is currently Acting Head, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and Associate Dean (Research and Administration), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. In addition to being General Editor of the new journal from Equinox called Linguistics and the Human Sciences (coming in April 2005), he is the Series Editor for the ten volume Collected Works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday (Continuum Books); and also the seven volume Collected Works for Professor Ruqaiya Hasan published by Equinox.