Linda L. Thornburg holds a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in English as a Foreign Language from Southern Illinois University (1967, 1977), and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California (1984). Her dissertation is titled Syntactic Reanalysis in Early English. She has taught at California State University, Fresno; Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, Lektor, and Docens; Southern Illinois University; and University of Hamburg. Her early publications, based on her dissertation, focused on the interaction of semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntactic change in early English. In the mid-1990s she began collaborating with Klaus Panther and together they have produced over 30 articles on conceptual metonymy, cognitive pragmatics (speech act constructions), cognitive morphology, grammatical constructions, grammatical and lexical aspect, and the influence of cultural folk models on language structure and use. They have presented their work in twenty-two countries. Since 2010, Linda and Klaus have been co-editors of the Benjamins book series Human Cognitive Processing, producing to date nineteen monographs and thirty-four collective volumes. Her most recent monograph co-authored with Klaus Panther is Motivation and Inference: A cognitive linguistic approach (2017,Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).