Gavin Brookes is Reader in Linguistics and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK.Niall Curry is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and English Language in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK, and Changjiang Chair at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. Emma Putland is Senior Research Associate for the project ‘Public Discourses of Dementia: Challenging stigma and promoting personhood’, based in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK.