1This preface, written by several hands, traces Sabine De Knop’s career since the early 2000s. The five contributions below pay tribute to Sabine De Knop’s involvement at the Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles (USL-B), but also acknowledge her commitment to linguistic research in Belgium and around the world.

2The first two contributions outline Sabine De Knop’s career at the USL-B. First, her colleagues from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature pay tribute to her involvement in the Department; her SeSLa co-chairs then describe her contribution to the development of research in linguistics at the USL-B. In the second part of this preface, Professors Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Fabio Mollica and Gaëtanelle Gilquin report on Sabine De Knop’s scientific projects and career from the early 2000s to the present day.

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3When the Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles was still called the ‘Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis’, Sabine De Knop already knew the institution from the inside, long before she became chair of the department in 2006. In 1975 she applied for a degree in ‘Germanic Philology’ (English/German) before obtaining her degree at Université catholique de Louvain in 1979. Between 1981 and 1986, she was an assistant to Professor René Jongen (1935 - 2012), who also became her thesis supervisor. The result of her PhD thesis called “Metaphorische Komposita in Zeitungsüberschriften” was published in 1987.

4After working as a French teacher in various German primary and secondary schools, Sabine returned to Brussels in 2001 to succeed Professor Jongen, first as a lecturer and then as a professor from 2010 to 2016. In 2016, she was promoted to distinguished professor.

5As Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature - a position she held from 2006 to 2020 - she was very much appreciated by both colleagues and students for her commitment to the department and her humane approach. She enthusiastically welcomed all students who arrived in Saint-Louis, and made sure that their journey was marked by activities that went beyond the strict framework of the curriculum, such as one-day excursions, trips abroad, and guest lectures. Her courses provided a strong background in German language and linguistics, thereby opening up career prospects in both the scientific and didactic fields for her students. This was a challenging task as most students arrive at university with almost no prior knowledge of German, but Sabine wholeheartedly embraced the task of teaching them German as a Foreign Language.

6Students have always been most enthusiastic about the solid German language programme at Saint-Louis. The warm atmosphere of Sabine’s classes and her open-mindedness have certainly contributed to this! Her willingness to stand up for those who need it most has been rewarded by the fact that many alumni are still in contact with her today. The distance between Hamburg, where she lived the most part of her professional career, and Brussels, where she stayed every other week, never stood in the way of her professionalism and high-quality work.

7Sabine De Knop was and remains very close to her colleagues, whose interests she has staunchly defended while respecting everyone’s individuality. She saw the diversity of the teaching staff in the department as a strength: the team includes professors and assistants from Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels, Germany, Switzerland, to name but a few. She has taken many assistants under her wing: Özlem Deniz, Sophie Depoterre, Daniela Dora, Françoise Gallez and Vera Höltschi. Sabine was one of the best doctoral advisers her PhD students (Françoise Gallez and Manon Hermann) could have hoped for – her subject matter knowledge, practical support and steadfast presence make her one of a kind.

8Sabine was a unifying force in our Department but also a trusted and dependable member of the Faculty of Arts and University Saint-Louis as a whole. Her strong sense of ethic, her academic excellence and dynamic personality will be sorely missed. We can only hope to do her justice in the years to come as we follow in her footsteps.

9Thank you, Professor De Knop, for all you have done for Germanic languages and for the university. We wish you all the best for the next chapter of your life.

10Grazia Berger, Matthieu Sergier, Jennifer Thewissen & Vera Höltschi

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11Sabine De Knop’s involvement at the USL-B is multifaceted and goes far beyond her activities within the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. The second account by Anne Dister and Dominique Longrée, both co-directors of the SeSLa research center, shows that Sabine De Knop is and has always been a driving force in the field of research at USL-B.

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12In November 2003, a small group of linguists from an institution that was then called ‘Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis’ asked the university’s Research Council to officially recognize the SeSLa (the acronym for ‘Séminaire des Sciences du Langage des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis’) as a research center within the institution. Sabine De Knop was one of the founders of this center and is currently one of its co-directors.

13Long before 2003, Saint-Louis linguists already frequently came together for various events and, as early as 2002, had unofficially founded the SeSLa to give their work more visibility. From an interdisciplinary perspective, they intended to pool and promote the work they were doing in various fields of linguistics. Since its foundation, one of the most important activities of the Center has been the organization of lectures and debates which are not only targeted at specialists in modern and ancient languages (researchers, teachers, students...) but also at a much wider audience. Sabine De Knop has been a regular speaker since June 2003, when, together with Michèle Lenoble-Pinson and Wim Mattens, she gave a presentation entitled “La création lexicale en allemand, en français et en néerlandais” (‘Lexical creation in German, French and Dutch’). She has been a regular participant in the SeSLa meetings, either as a speaker or as an organizer: in 2003 she spoke about the fossilization of errors in German as a Foreign Language (after a lecture by Patrick Froissac on the same phenomenon in English), and, in 2006 she presented her area of expertise, namely cognitive approaches in linguistics and language teaching.

14Sabine De Knop has also been involved in the organization of numerous international conferences and meetings under the aegis of the SeSLa. These include the Spring Day of the “Cercle Belge de Linguistique - Belgische Kring voor Linguistiek” in May 2004 (together with Martine Willems and Dominique Longrée), the international conference “Expressions of motion and posture in Germanic languages” in 2008 (together with Françoise Gallez and Julien Perrez), and, in 2017, the “Funktionsverbgefüge in den germanischen Sprachen” conference (together with Manon Hermann).

15The SeSla also owes its reputation to the various scientific and editorial projects that Sabine De Knop has been involved in: as chief editor of the research project “Metbib”, an electronic bibliography published by Benjamins in Amsterdam, and as associate member of the research project “Cogbib”, an electronic database on cognitive linguistics published online by Mouton de Gruyter in Berlin since 2006. Since 2008, she has been coordinating the research project “Expressions of movement and position in Germanic languages” together with Julien Perrez and Françoise Gallez. She took on two other major projects in the following years: “Cognitive Sociolinguistics: language variation in its structural conceptual and cultural dimensions” in 2010, and “Learner corpora and cognitive linguistics” the following year. She is also involved in various national and international collaborations, such as “COGMOD Project: Developing a multilingual constructicon: theoretical explorations and pedagogical applications”, initiated in 2013 at the Universidad de La Rioja, “Application of Construction(s) Grammars to Germanic language learning” (since 2015 and in collaboration with Françoise Gallez), “Causal constructions between construction(s) grammars and phraseology”, “The family of German constructions with a dative”, “Support verb phrases in Germanic languages”, “Pleonastic constructions as expressions of intensification”. Each of these projects associates the SeSLa with various German, Italian or Spanish partners. Sabine De Knop has also actively supervised several PhD projects at the SeSLa.

16Since 2013, Sabine De Knop has been the dynamic, efficient and enthusiastic President of the SeSLa. She is constantly putting her energy at the service of the Center, and scrupulously ensures that each of the languages is well represented in the multiple activities we organize. Although we are saddened by her departure, we know that it is only a farewell, and that Sabine will return very soon to share her future research endeavors with the research center she helped create.

17Anne Dister & Dominique Longrée

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18Throughout her career, Sabine De Knop has also inspired many scholars worldwide and contributed to the development of research in German and contrastive linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and foreign language teaching/learning. In the following, three renowned linguists sketch out Sabine De Knop’s scientific career through time and describe their research collaboration with her.

19First, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, who works at the Universidad de la Rioja in Spain and has collaborated with Sabine De Knop on numerous occasions since the early 2000s, recalls her scientific career from 2000 to about 2010.

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20The years 2000 to 2010 were tremendously productive for Professor Sabine De Knop. She published some theoretical papers on such topics as text interpretation and metaphorical formation and on certain grammatical constructions. However, the greatest impact of her work in this period is ascribable to her applied work on the connection between motivated linguistic explanation and language teaching. Starting with a paper on metaphor as a metalinguistic second language learning strategy, she soon found herself heavily influenced by her academic association with the late Professor René Dirven (University of Duisburg), one of the most influential figures of Cognitive Linguistics in Europe. Such an association turned into mutually respectful and rapidly maturing friendship, which would yield significant fruits for Cognitive Linguistics. Sabine De Knop was interested in motivating language teaching decisions by means of the systematic theoretical investigation of linguistic phenomena. Admittedly, the emphasis of Cognitive Linguistics on the cognitive motivation of grammar was very attractive in this regard. Around this time, René Dirven had become one of the proponents (and passionate defender) of a cognitive-linguistic approach to language teaching. He had programmatically defined the goals of the cognitive version of Pedagogical Grammar. This idea was taken up and developed by other cognitive linguists, and at this time very specially by Sabine De Knop. Her work to promote these developments culminated in a volume dedicated to this subject, “Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar”, edited by professor De Knop in collaboration with Teun De Rycker in 2008. Significantly, the book was published in the new thriving Mouton de Gruyter book series “Applications of Cognitive Linguistics” (ACL), which René Dirven had founded with the cooperation of some colleagues just two years before. This book featured papers by some of the most prominent scholars in Cognitive Linguistics, among them such figures as Ronald W. Langacker, John R. Taylor, and René Dirven himself. In fact, Professors Dirven and De Knop co-authored an important paper in this volume. This paper, by providing a contrastive analysis of motion and location events in German, French, and English for pedagogical purposes, laid the methodological foundation for other Pedagogical Grammar studies and set the stage for related developments of these initial postulates which materialized in two later volumes: “Fostering language teaching efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics” (ACL, Mouton de Gruyter), coedited with Frank Boers and Antoon De Rycker, and “Applied Construction Grammar”, coedited with Gaëtanelle Gilquin, which would see the light in the same book series in 2016. Sabine De Knop herself, together with Antoon De Rycker had laid out the historical background and motivation for all this work in their joint study “Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching: Historical background and new developments”, published in 2009 in the “Journal of Modern Languages”, where they give evidence of the advantages of Cognitive Linguistics over other approaches to language to improve the efficacy of Foreign Language Teaching.

21Sabine De Knop had also become a regular participant at the LAUD (Linguistic Agency University of Duisburg) symposia. These symposia had been initiated in 1977 at the University of Trier by René Dirven. They were then hosted from 1985 to 1999 by the University of Duisburg (Professor Dirven’s university) and then they were taken up and promoted by Martin Pütz at Koblenz-Landau. Also, in the mid 2000s, Sabine De Knop, together with other prominent international scholars, gave full support to Professor Dirven’s two large-scale bibliographical projects: first to Mouton’s CogBib (“Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography”), and later to John Benjamins’s MetBib (“Bibliography on Metaphor and Metonymy”). Both projects consisted in electronic databases with thousands of entries each. CogBib was specialized in publications on any topic in Cognitive Linguistics, while MetBib was focused on figurative language from any theoretical or applied perspective. With all this joint work, René Dirven became heavily influential on Sabine De Knop’s own initiatives and Sabine De Knop, in turn, got to know Professor Dirven much better than most other colleagues. It is for that reason that in 2009, Sabine De Knop was chosen by the editor of the “Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics”, published by John Benjamins, to conduct an interview with René Dirven, which was published in the 2010 yearly volume. This interview joined others prepared for this journal featuring such scholars as George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and Raymond Gibbs, among others.

22Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez

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23Sabine De Knop has continued her research in Cognitive Linguistics by exploring, among others, typical German expressions within the framework of Construction Grammar. In this context, she has been collaborating with Fabio Mollica from the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale since the beginning of the 2010s. In the following contribution, he comes back on this collaboration and outlines Sabine De Knop’s projects in contrastive linguistics, Construction Grammar and language teaching over the past ten years.

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24I met Sabine De Knop some time between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, when I was working as an assistant professor at the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Jena (Germany). I was at the beginning of my studies in Construction Grammar (CG), and eager to get in touch with colleagues who shared my main research interest: applying the CG model to the description of typical German constructions, and to their contrast with Romance languages. Back then, Construction Grammar was becoming established as a descriptive model for German, but was almost unknown for the analysis of Romance languages. It was at this point that I heard some enthusiastic talk among my colleagues about a Belgian Germanist, a French speaker, who worked with a constructivist and cognitivist approach. This scholar was, of course, Sabine De Knop!

25I contacted her immediately and proposed that she and I, together with my colleague Julia Kuhn, organize a section on Construction Grammar and Romance languages at the “Deutscher Romanistentag” (the German Romanists’ Congress) in Berlin in September 2011. Sabine accepted my proposal and, to our delight, the section “Konstruktionsgrammatik und romanische Sprachen” was also accepted by the scientific committee of the conference. Our edited volume “Konstruktionsgrammatik in den romanischen Sprachen” (20131), containing selected contributions from our Berlin section, was published in 2013. Since then, Sabine and I have enjoyed a proficuous collaboration, as can be seen from her list of publications.

26Sabine’s research interests are manifold, and it would be impossible to describe them in detail here, but in 2010, she returned to the study of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. She has continued to work on conceptual metaphor (see, among others, 2010, 2014 and 2020), including from a glottodidactic perspective (see, among others, 2015). In this regard, mention should be made of the “Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy (Metbib)” (2010), edited by De Knop, Dirven, Yu & Smieja. She has also authored or co-authored numerous studies on typical constructions or aspects of the German language. Sabine’s research interests range from prepositions, in particular ‘bis’, (cf. among others 2010, 2013) to pleonastic constructions (2021), but it is above all expressions of motion events, placement verbs (2011, 2015, 2016, 2020, 2020, 2021) and causal constructions - with adjectives expressing a color - that have most attracted her interest over the years (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2015, 2016). Sabine has also worked (sometimes with me) on verbless constructions (2019, 2021), dative constructions (2016, 2017) and, especially in recent years, embodiment (2020 and 2020).

27The ‘leitmotif’ within this wide range of research topics is the contrastive approach (German-French, but also German-French-Italian) with a focus on the didactic application of the theoretical models of reference (Construction Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics). Of particular note in this respect is the cycle of CALP (Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy) conferences initiated by Sabine and Gaëtanelle Gilquin in 2013; some of the papers were then published in the volume “Applied Construction Grammar” (2016).

28In the course of her career, Sabine has also trained some brilliant young researchers: she was the doctoral supervisor of Françoise Gallez and Manon Hermann, with whom she subsequently collaborated scientifically (see, among others, 2008, 2011, 2020). With Manon Hermann she organized the conference “Light verb constructions in Germanic languages” in 2017. I myself am grateful for what Sabine has taught me.

29Not least, she is a magnetic speaker who captivates and enraptures her audience during her presentations: she is a sort of ‘didactic entertainer’ and it is always a pleasure to listen to her. This quality has led her to be invited as the plenary speaker at numerous renowned conferences around the world (such as the International Conference on Construction Grammar 9 and 10 held in Juiz de Fora – Brazil – in 2016 and in Paris in 2018, 9^th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference in Genova – Italy – or 3^rd International Conference on Meaning Construction, Meaning Interpretation in La Rioja – Spain). Her list of publications also shows how many international collaborations she has been involved in.

30I feel particularly fortunate to have met Sabine De Knop, who has not only been a great teacher and a trusted friend but also a scientific and personal reference point. Thanks to Sabine, I have learned about many aspects of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. It has always been a pleasure and an honor to collaborate with this great scholar, to whom I extend my gratitude as a student, a colleague and a friend!

31Fabio Mollica

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32In the last account Gaëtanelle Gilquin looks back at the organization of the first CALP which Sabine De Knop and herself initiated in 2013. This conference has since been re-hosted at several universities around the world.

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33In September 2012, Sabine sent me an email to ask whether I would be interested in organizing a conference with her on the pedagogical applications of Construction Grammar. Sabine and I did not know each other very well at the time, but our common research interests and her contagious enthusiasm soon convinced me to embark on this project with her – and this is how CALP (Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy) was born!

34Sabine’s well-known organizational skills, her strong sense of early planning, and her ability to mobilize people did wonders for the preparation of the conference, which was due to take place at Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles, on 8-9 November 2013. For our choice of plenary speakers, we aimed for the stars, and we reached them, with Adele Goldberg, Thomas Herbst, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, and Dominique Willems all kindly agreeing to share their expertise with the CALP audience.

35We received more abstracts than we had hoped for, given the very specific theme of the conference and the fact that not many researchers seemed to work on this topic at the time. The response to the call for participation was also very good, and in the end there were almost as many people attending the conference without giving a talk as there were speakers presenting their work. The presentations and discussions during the conference were extremely rich and stimulating, and when we reached the closing session, it was clear to everyone that the CALP story should not end there.

36The second edition of the CALP conference, organized by Karin Madlener and Heike Behrens, took place at the University of Basel on 10-11 June 2016, and the third one, organized by Hans C. Boas, was held at the University of Texas at Austin on 15-17 February 2018. While the COVID-19 pandemic has put on hold many conferences, including CALP, the fourth edition is planned to be organized by Thomas Herbst at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg as soon as the health situation makes this possible.

37As the initiator of the CALP conference series and an editor of the CALP 1 proceedings volume (De Knop & Gilquin 2016), Sabine has had a crucial impact on the development of a new field of research which we called “Applied Construction Grammar”. Equally important, though, is the beneficial effect that Sabine has had on so many people around the world, both as a researcher and as a person, through her thought-provoking articles, passionate talks, constructive comments, extraordinary enthusiasm, and genuine interest in people. I, for one, will be forever grateful for all that I have learned from her and for the trust, generosity, and friendship that she has shown to me over the years.

38Gaëtanelle Gilquin

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39The last three accounts, as well as the list of publications at the end of this volume, show how prolific and international Sabine De Knop’s career has been. She has collaborated with many scholars and her research has opened doors and brought out research questions which linguists are still working on now. She has not only fostered bonds between disciplines, but also between people.

40The preface demonstrates that beyond her great professionalism as a teacher and as a researcher, the human dimension has always been essential to her. She was, is and will always be a source of inspiration that will guide us all day-by-day in our academic and non-academic life. For all this, we would like to thank you, Sabine!