Editorial

The Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association has developed into a renowned publication venue in which both early-career researchers and established colleagues publish papers that often offer a first glimpse on highly innovative ongoing research. As the new editors-in-chief, we are therefore very happy that the board of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (DGKL / GCLA) has entrusted us with the responsibility to continue the successful history of the Yearbook. The change in editorship goes in tandem with another change: In previous years, the Yearbooks published in uneven years served as proceedings volumes for the GCLA conference series, while those published in even years were thematic volumes with different volume editors. However, we and the GCLA board felt that it would have significant advantages to make the publication mode more journal-like, which is why we will have an open call for each of the Yearbooks from now on, usually not restricted to some narrower volume-specific topic. While the presenters at the GCLA conference are of course cordially invited to submit their work, the yearly calls are open for everyone working on topics in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We specifically invite early-career scholars to consider the Yearbook as a publication venue.

In the year that marks the twentieth anniversary of the GCLA’s foundation, the present volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics is still a thriving field of research that can contribute significantly to our understanding of language and its cognitive underpinnings. The contributions to this volume reflect a number of both long-standing and emerging research trends within the field, or investigate well-established topics in the light of new data and methods. For example, two contributions revisit conceptual metaphor theory from a corpus-based, computational-linguistic, and experimental-semiotic perspective, while another analyzes metapragmatic practices from a frame-semantic point of view. Further topics include multimodality, spatial language, and child language acquisition. Reflecting current discussions and trends in the field, one paper deals with the role of paradigms in usage-based Construction Grammar, weighing in on the discussion of how constructions and constructional networks should be modelled, and another takes up the trending topic of colexification, i.e. the phenomenon that different concepts come to be expressed with only one word. The contributions also cover a variety of different languages, as well as various methodological approaches.

We would like to thank everyone involved – the authors, the reviewers, and the team at De Gruyter – for their contributions to the present volume.

Leipzig, Düsseldorf, 31.07.2024

Antje Quick & Stefan Hartmann