Editorial: Cognitive Linguistics as an interdisciplinary endeavour

Originally scheduled for Autumn 2020 but postponed twice due to the Covid19 pandemic, the 9th International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (DGKL/GCLA-9) finally took place in digital form from 1st to 4th March 2022. It was hosted jointly by the universities of Erfurt and Hannover, attracted more than 150 participants from 20 European and non-European countries, and saw 79 active contributions.

In their role as conference organisers, the editors of this Yearbook gladly acknowledge the support lent to the conference by the German Research Fund (DFG). They also wish to thank the following colleagues, who supported the conference as members of its programme committee: Heike Behrens, Alice Blumenthal-Dramé, Hans Boas, Bert Cappelle, Hubert Cuyckens, Holger Diessel, Gabriele Diewald, Susanne Flach, Stefan Hartmann, Thomas Herbst, Martin Hilpert, Thomas Hoffmann, Nina Julich, Elma Kerz, Sebastian Kürschner, Alexander Lasch, Jeannette Littlemore, Arne Lohmann, Karin Madlener-Charpentier, Susanne Niemeier, Florent Perek, Antje Quick, Patrick Rebuschat, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Doris Schönefeld, Katerina Stathi, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Peter Uhrig, Daniel Wiechmann, Bodo Winter, Arne Zeschel, Alexander Ziem.

Under the framing topic “Cognitive Linguistics as an Interdisciplinary Endeavour: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges”, the 2022 conference took up longstanding developments in the paradigm, characterized by the increasingly sophisticated use of a broadening range of empirical methods since the quantitative/empirical turn in Cognitive Linguistics. While the growing emphasis on the ‘Usage-Based Model’ (e.g. Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Langacker 1988, 2000; Tomasello 1998) and its methodological implementation in empirical research caused a surge of quantitative corpus-linguistic work in Cognitive Construction Grammar and Cognitive Semantics (documented in, e.g., Glynn and Fischer [2010]; Gries and Stefanowitsch [2006]; Stefanowitsch and Gries [2006]), the trend towards the use of multiple empirical methods in Cognitive Linguistics has been much broader from early on (for illustration, see the EMCL workshop series documented at https://empmetcoglin.github.io/ as well as Gonzalez-Marquez et al. [2007]; Janda [2013, 2017]; Schönefeld [2011]).

Given that a number of preceding conferences of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association – notably those held in 2008 at Leipzig University (“Converging evidence”), in 2012 at the University of Freiburg (“Cognitive Linguistics in the World: Situated and Embodied Approaches”) and in 2014 at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen (“Constructions and Cognition”) – had already traced varying aspects of this expansion, the Erfurt conference focussed on the growing interdisciplinary character of Cognitive Linguistics as a paradigm not just cross-cutting the traditional borderlines of established linguistic subdisciplines (like corpus-, psycho-, neuro-, and sociolinguistics, computer linguistics, contrastive linguistics, linguistic typology, language acquisition research and gesture studies), but also bridging over to neighbouring disciplines in the cognitive, social, neuro- and data sciences in the pursuit of research topics ranging from the nature of lexical meaning, syntactic constructions and the constructicon itself to multimodal communication and usage-based perspectives on language acquisition.

Mirroring the general character of the conference contributions to DGKL/GCLA-9, those selected for the 10th edition of the Yearbook characterize the cognitive-functional paradigm as one that, in the course of these developments, has both matured (in terms of its research topics, theoretical foundations and methodological repertoire) and remained young (in terms of what a new generation of scholars can bring to the paradigm). Moreover, the contributions to this edition of the Yearbook, though reflecting the diversity of the field, also share the spirit of Wulff’s (2022) call for a “responsible and theory-driven use” of empirical methods.

While many contributions present novel empirical work, both corpus-linguistic (Glynn and Biryukova, Montes and Geeraerts, Rauhut, Uhrig, Wyroślak) and experimental (Lesuisse), there are also papers reviewing existing empirical work and/or theoretical debates in the light of current theoretical (Cappelle) or methodological (Behrens and Pfänder; Hartmann et al.; Ungerer) considerations, thus inspiring future research and contributing to theory building.

Two of the corpus-linguistic contributions approach classic Cognitive Linguistics topics, viz. lexical polysemy (Montes and Geeraerts) and conceptual metaphor (Glynn and Biryukova) from the perspective of corpus/distributional semantics, but with different goals. The former present three case studies on adjectival polysemy in Dutch explicitly designed to assess the possibilities and limits of the use of ‘vector space models’ and, more specifically, to enable a comparison between the disambiguation achieved by human annotators and an automatic disambiguation of the same data. The latter is of an exploratory nature, applying ‘Behavioural Profiles’ to the study of the cross-cultural variation found in the metaphorical expression of emotion concepts, specifically to the analysis of boredom metaphors in English and Russian. The authors thus contribute not only to an empirically founded version of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but also reflect on the use of corpus-based quantitative methods in contrastive linguistics.

The remaining corpus-linguistic papers are likewise largely exploratory, testing a variety of quantitative methods to make new inroads into a number of less well-researched topics ranging from the level of word classes (Rauhut) to the level of discourse (Wyroślak) and multimodal communication (Uhrig). The chapter by Rauhut presents an attempt to identify specific nominal subclasses (plurale/singulare tantum) employing the corpus-driven method of ‘bootstrapping’ based on (the presence/absence of) the plural marker. This attempt also amounts to an empirical assessment of Cognitive-Linguistic claims about the morphology-syntax continuum and the nature of word classes. Approaching the analysis of discourse from a usage-based perspective that allows for the implementation of quantitative methods, Wyroślak studies the multifunctionality of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se in a corpus of conversational Polish, implementing a small-scale profile-based analysis, i.e. complementing the qualitative analyses of its usage by a ‘Multiple Correspondence Analysis’ of its occurrences in a test sample from the same corpus. The chapter by Uhrig, finally, widens the perspective by bringing in multimodal corpus data, using a version of ‘collostruction analysis’ adapted to the requirements of the study of cross-modal co-occurrences, here consisting of the occurrence of co-speech gestures with a set of verbs of throwing. The author also tests hypotheses about the relations between the occurrence of co-speech gestures on the one hand and such usage parameters as the (in)formality and figurativity of the verbal uses on the other. While by far not all of these case studies can (fully) confirm their initial hypotheses, all of them reflect on important methodological issues and create hypotheses for future research.

Psycho- and neurolinguistic methods play a role in the very different contributions by Lesuisse, Ungerer and Capelle. Continuing the Cognitive-Linguistic research tradition on spatial language, Lesuisse presents a full-blown hypothesis-testing study of (the diverse) linguistic constructions expressing locative events in French, English and Dutch. To investigate speaker’s on-line conceptualizations of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli in two memorization tasks, the author employs an eye-tracking paradigm, showing that, if carefully stated at the right level of granularity, questions of linguistic relativity can reliably be studied empirically. The stimulating methodological discussion provided by Ungerer reviews a large range of priming experiments in order to assess the potential of priming paradigms for the empirical investigation of constructional relations/networks, suggesting methodological extensions for future research. Cappelle, finally, offers detailed theoretical reflections on the relevance of the long-standing (originally formalist) debate on ‘Lexical Integrity’ to present-day usage- and construction-based theorizing about the relation between morphology and syntax, reviewing both theoretical arguments and existing neurolinguistic evidence from a usage- and construction-based angle.

Usage-based language acquisition studies have contributed to the empirical turn in Cognitive Linguistics from very early on (e.g. Tomasello 2003). The contributions by Hartmann et al. as well as Behrens and Pfänder continue this tradition in different ways. In the context of an application of the usage-based model to the study of multilingual language acquisition, the former review a number of preceding case studies to present a methodologically oriented discussion of the chances and limitations of the ‘trace-back method’. The latter argue that, in order to capture the richness of a learner’s (situated, social-interactive) language experience, a full-blown usage-based approach should include (qualitative) methods and concepts from Interactional Linguistics (including Conversation Analysis) in its research programme.

Linguistic creativity, finally, has been a part of the Cognitive-Linguistic research agenda for quite a while, not least since the introduction of the notion of Conceptual Integration/Blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). This edition of the Yearbook closes with a paper by Hoffmann, who presents a number of detailed qualitative analyses of pertinent multimodal data aiming at the further development of a construction-based approach to linguistic creativity.