Chiara Ghezzi is a researcher at the University of Bergamo, where she was previously Adjunct Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and Didactics of the Italian Language. She received her PhD from the University of Pavia with a dissertation entitled 'Vagueness Markers in Contemporary Italian: Intergenerational Variation and Pragmatic Change'. Her research interests include historical pragmatics, the history of old Italian, grammaticalization theory, sociolinguistic variation in contemporary Italian, and discourse and pragmatic markers. Her publications include three articles in Linguistica e Filologia. Piera Molinelli is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Bergamo. She coordinates several Italian national research groups and has organized national and international conferences. Her areas of research include diachronic and historical linguistics, the history of Latin and old Italian, discourse and pragmatic markers, grammaticalization, language contact, and multilingualism. She is the author of Fenomeni della negazione dal latino all'italiano (La Nuova Italia 1988), along with a number of journal articles, and is co-editor of Ars linguistica (Bulzoni 1998), Comunicare nella torre di Babele. Repertori plurilingui in Italia oggi (Carocci 2001), Synchrony and Diachrony: A dynamic interface (Benjamins 2013), and Plurilinguismo e diglossia nella Tarda Antichità e nel Medioevo (SISMEL Il Galluzzo 2013).