1This book aims to pay tribute to Sabine De Knop through her three main research areas, namely “Language and Cognition”, “Construction Grammar” and “Applied linguistics and foreign language pedagogy”. Each of these sections includes contributions from different authors who have collaborated with Sabine throughout her career.

2Part I deals with language and cognition. The first two contributions focus on figurative language, metaphor and metonymy. It is in this field that Sabine De Knop started her scientific career with her PhD-thesis entitled “Überschriftenmagnete: Untersuchung von Metaphorischen Komposita in Zeitungsüberschriften”, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. René Jongen. In this dissertation she analyzed metaphorical compounds in German newspaper headlines. The topic of conceptual metaphors, initiated by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), has accompanied her throughout her career. Here are some examples of publications on this topic: “Conceptual Metaphors for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs to French learners” (with J. Perrez in 20101); “Conceptual metaphors as a tool for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs” (with J. Perrez in 2014); “Vizualisation and conceptual metaphor as tools for the teaching of abstract motion in German” (2015). Sabine De Knop even recently (April 2021) addressed the topic of Covid through metaphors and frames in an oral presentation at SeSLa (USL-B) entitled “Un ‘tsunami’ d’images : les métaphores et les ‘frames’ autour de la pandémie”. With this presentation, she returns to her first love and shows how current events and linguistic landscapes stimulate her endless linguistic curiosity.

3This part begins with the contribution of Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, entitled “The causal frame as a motivating factor of figurative meaning”. In this contribution, the author looks at the EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymy (e.g. a sad book - ‘a book that causes its reader to feel sad’) and tries to show that this metonymy plays a more important role in figurative language use than previously assumed. He argues that this metonymy does not only support grammar, but also other figurative processes: “the EFFECT FOR CAUSE metonymy is seen as a ubiquitous phenomenon which can not only motivate grammar but also act as a prerequisite for other cognitive operations resulting in conceptually complex figurative expressions” (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez in this volume, 38). He shows that this metonymy can also play a role in figurative language use in three different ways: through hypallages, through interaction with hyperbole and through its licensing role (in metaphorical amalgams and synesthesia).

4Next, Stefan Engelberg explores the topic of metaphors and metonymy in his contribution “Musterhafte Strukturen im Bereich von Metaphern und Metonymien”. The author deals with the concept of paradigmatic metaphorical pattern, that is, a paradigmatic structure that describes how words are used metaphorically within a word field. He first addresses the more often studied metonymic patterns and then turns to metaphors. He argues that words within a word field develop similar metaphorical potential and transfer some specific semantic features from the source domain of the metaphor to the target domain (“saliente Interpretations-
präferenz” - Engelberg in this volume, 55). For instance, words like Brise (breeze), Flut (flood), Lawine (avalanche) or Orkan (hurricane) have a similar metaphorical potential and constitute a common pattern based on specific shared features.

5After Metaphors, Sabine De Knop focused on two other topics that are covered in the next two parts: Construction Grammar (Part II) and Applied linguistics and foreign language learning & teaching (Part III). These two topics have guided Sabine De Knop throughout her career and are intrinsically linked. Here are some examples of her recent contributions combining the two topics: “Ditransitive Argumentstrukturkonstruktionen im DaF-Unterricht” (with F. Mollica, in prep.); “Construction-based language teaching and learning” (in prep.); “Von der Konstruktionsbeschreibung zum Konstruktionslernen illustriert am Beispiel der verblosen Direktiva” (2021); “Construction-based teaching of German verbless directives to Italian-speaking learners” (with F. Mollica, in 2021). The CALP-conference (Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy), which she initiated in 2013 with Gaëtanelle Gilquin, is also a perfect example of this intrinsic interconnection.

6In Part II, the focus is on Construction Grammar (CxG). The contributions just mentioned as well as the several invitations to present plenary lectures on this topic at international conferences (Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil in 2016, Sorbonne Nouvelle & Université Paris 3 in 2018, etc.) demonstrate Sabine De Knop’s great expertise in this field. Not only has she contributed considerably to the analysis of German constructions, notably from a contrastive linguistics perspective (e.g. constructions with specific German prepositions and adverbials, ‘verblose Direktiva’, pleonastic constructions, ditransitive constructions), but she has also proposed a critical analysis of previous studies and suggested new approaches for the description of constructions (e.g. “Expressions of motion events in German: An integrative constructionist approach for FLT” (2020)).

7The first contribution (Boas & Ziem) discusses a descriptive model from a theoretical and methodological perspective. The following five contributions deal with high- and low-level constructions in one language (Herbst & Habermann; Laporte; Bouveret) or from a contrastive perspective (Carmen Mellado Blanco, Fabio Mollica & Elmar Schafroth; Cristiano Broccias, Annalisa Baicchi & Marco Bagli). Part II is dedicated to constructionist and corpus-based analyzes, but several accounts include some considerations about language teaching & learning.

8In their contribution entitled “Debunking some myths about the role and relevance of (restricted) semantic role sets: Some thoughts on Ágel & Höllein 2021”, Hans C. Boas & Alexander Ziem discuss Ágel and Höllein’s (2021) adaptation of a “significative-semantic theory” of semantic roles which assumes that a restricted list of semantic roles is useful to model so-called “Satzbauplanzeichen” (‘clause pattern signs’). Relying on Fillmore’s bottom-up conception of Frame Semantics (from 1982 onwards) and on the description of Berkeley FrameNet, they point out several problems in Ágel and Höllein’s (2021) approach and argue that opening the set of situation-specific semantic roles (conceptualized as building blocks of constructions) as in FrameNet is “an empirically necessary method for capturing and analyzing the full breadth and depth of the nature of different meaning structures and their different syntactic realizations” (Boas & Ziem in this volume, 76).

9In the second contribution, “The German so-was-von construction”, Mechthild Habermann & Thomas Herbst provide a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the idiosyncratic so-was-von construction, which expresses an evaluation. They first propose a corpus-based description of the formal and functional properties of the prototypical so-was-von construction in present-day German and suggest a usage-based representation that also includes a set of typical slot fillers which they refer to as the “collo-profile of the construction” (Habermann & Herbst in this volume, 106). Then, they outline a possible motivation path of the so-was-von construction from a diachronic perspective and show that this synchronically not transparent construction can historically “be explained as an expression that is formed on the basis of established patterns of today’s language and has fossilized in some respect or another” (Habermann & Herbst in this volume, 98).

10Samantha Laporte’s contribution, entitled “Casting new light on the caused-motion construction: Some Evidence from Harry Potter”, provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the caused-motion construction (CMC), based on the manual extraction of the construction in the first book of the Harry Potter series. The quantitative analysis provides an overview of the distribution of the verbs and of the different senses of the construction according to Goldberg (1995) and accounts for the literal vs. metaphorical uses of the CMC, whereas the qualitative analysis focuses on the properties of metaphoricity in the use of the construction. The results highlight the high productivity of the CMC and the gradient the metaphorical uses take. This study also illustrates that “some metaphorical instances can be grouped as belonging to the same semantic field, testifying to some preferential patterns of metaphorical extensions” (Laporte in this volume, 128). Finally, it points to the importance of an exhaustive and usage-based approach to verify intuition-based claims about the CMC.

11In her contribution “Constructionalization of verbal causative periphrases in French faire, laisser, mettre à, donner à + Vinf”, Myriam Bouveret compares the nature and use of these near synonymous verbal causative periphrases in French. She examines the four constructions from a syntactic and semantic point of view using seven criteria, namely the strength, the nature, the source of the causation as well as the aspect, diathesis properties and the constructional and phraseological values of these periphrases. Her description of the similarities and differences between these constructions aims to “help with differentiating and making a choice in order to help the foreign language learner figure out which relevant construction to use in a given context” (Bouveret in this volume, 134). The study shows that the four constructions under scrutiny are used in different contexts and that even though faire + Vinf is the most well-known causative expression among foreign language learners, it is not the only common verbal causative periphrase in French.

12In their contribution entitled “The expression of negative polarity in German, Italian and Spanish: A constructionist approach”, Carmen Mellado Blanco, Fabio Mollica & Elmar Schafroth explore the construction family of negative polarity ‘Absolute Lack of Interest’ with the meaning ‘sth does not interest sb’ in the three languages from a constructionist and corpus-based perspective. The ‘Absolute Lack of Interest’ construction family licenses constructions which the authors classify as “constructional idioms” ((Mellado Blanco et al. in this volume, 153). The paper discusses the functional equivalence of instantiations with the verbs importar (Sp.), fregare (It.) and interessieren (Ger.) and examines the productivity and entrenchment of the constructions. First, the authors provide a quantitative and qualitative description of the constructional idioms in each language, focussing on the nominal slot fillers (lexical domains, masc. vs. fem. nouns). Then, they outline the family of constructions from a contrastive perspective according to their degree of entrenchment and the lexical renewal of the slot fillers. The differences observed between the Spanish, Italian and German constructions reflect “the world’s conceptualization and culture of each linguistic community” (Mellado Blanco et al. in this volume, 172).

13Cristiano Broccias, Annalisa Baicchi & Marco Bagli’s contribution, entitled “Contrasting English and Italian simultaneity subordinators as/come, while/mentre, when/quando: A preliminary investigation”, deals with the use of these subordinators as simultaneity markers in original and translated English and Italian data. The data were categorized according to the predicates occurring in the clause and the type of aspect (Engl.) and tense (It.) used. The results show that there is no one-to-one equivalence between the English and the Italian “simultaneity networks” (Broccias et al. in this volume, 193), i.e. the English and Italian subordinators do not have the same distribution and do not interact with tense and aspect in the same way. Whereas when and quando are very similar, as and come do not have the same distribution. Therefore, mentre does not only cover the uses of while but also those of as. This should be focused on in foreign language teaching & learning. The analysis of translation data unveils differences with the original data in the use of aspect and tense.

14As already mentioned, only a few of Sabine De Knop’s research projects are not rooted in applied linguistics and foreign language learning and teaching. As a teacher of German language and linguistics in Brussels, she is constantly confronted with the challenges faced by French-speaking learners of this language. The typological differences between these two languages feed her daily life as a teacher and inevitably inspire numerous of her publications.

15In her research on German posture verbs, for example, she identifies the challenges that they represent for learners and proposes some guidelines for their effective teaching (conceptual metaphors and Embodied Teaching). In relation to her research in Construction Grammar, she has recently conducted empirical interventions in schools to actually quantify the effectiveness of the proposed constructionist teaching approaches, cf. “Ditransitive Argumentstrukturkonstruktionen im DaF-Unterricht” (with Fabio Mollica, in prep.).

16The five contributions below approach foreign language teaching from different perspectives. The first two (Gilquin; Gallez & Hermann) focus on the teaching of specific constructions. Sambre et al. do not look at a specific construction, but at the more global expression of the future. Finally, the last two contributions broaden the perspectives on teaching methods and the role of the teacher. The approaches and methodologies adopted in these contributions are sometimes very different, which testifies to the diversity in foreign language pedagogy - a diversity that is also found in Sabine De Knop’s work.

17Gaëtanelle Gilquin’s contribution, entitled “Data-driven learning one’s way through constructions”, provides a perfect transition between the contributions on Construction Grammar (Part II) and the contributions on foreign language learning & teaching (Part III), as she combines these two domains by means of a data-driven learning experiment. In this experiment, learners of English as a foreign language are asked to analyze corpus concordances for three given constructions (the make causative construction, the way construction, the into causative construction) and to complete a worksheet requiring them to make generalizations about the observed constructions (e.g. identification of their meaning, their typical constituents and their creative power). This study thus combines “the pedagogical potential of corpus linguistics and Construction Grammar to propose a pedagogical experiment centering around the acquisition of constructions” (Gilquin in this volume, 197).

18The contribution of Françoise Gallez & Manon Hermann, entitled “Lexikalisierungsmuster zum Ausdruck der Lokalisierung und Fortbewegung im Deutschen: ein didaktischer Ansatz”, focuses on the realization of two typical expressions of motion and localization in German: the caused-motion construction (Germ. Er hustet die Postkarte vom Tisch – ‘He coughs the postcard off the table’) and noun-verb-phrases with posture verbs (Germ. Sie stehen unter Beobachtung – ‘They stand under observation’). These two patterns are particularly challenging for French-speaking learners of German, because of the typological differences between the two languages. Following Sabine De Knop’s observations on this topic, Gallez & Hermann propose a teaching methodology based on Embodied Teaching. After presenting the purpose of the study and the intended teaching approach, the authors describe the promising results of an intervention study they conducted at three Belgian universities.

19In their paper entitled “Constructing futurity: A Contrastive approach to L1 and L2 Dutch and French”, Paul Sambre, Julien Perrez, Pascale Van Keirsbilck & Cornelia Wermuth investigate the expression of future time among L1 and L2 speakers of Dutch and French. They analyze 20 video-recorded interviews in which 2^nd year students are asked questions about their professional future, in their L1 and thereafter in L2. The productions in L1 allow them to identify authentic constructions for future time and to show that these go far beyond purely verbal expressions. They also consider the conceptual interplay between future time and different modalities (epistemic modality and dynamic modality). These observations allow them to formulate teaching guidelines that include not only temporal aspects of futurity but also modal ones. Their aim is to rethink traditional teaching practices: “we want to explore how the traditional method for teaching verbal tenses can be complemented by authentic complex clausal patterns and lexical information for imagining the future in communicative actions” (Sambre et al. in this volume, 248).

20The contribution by Fanny Meunier & Ferran Suñer Muñoz, entitled “Teacher feedback in the foreign language classroom: Navigating between beliefs, perceptions and practices”, focuses on teacher corrective feedback in the foreign language classroom. In a first step, they present the main findings and recommendations emerging from the feedback studies, including the following questions: How effective is oral and written feedback? What mistakes need to be corrected? When and how should they be corrected? Who should the feedback come from? In a second step, they compare these trends with current teacher practices in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, on the basis of three case studies. They also investigate the similarities and differences between teachers’ and learners’ views. One of their objectives is indeed to come up with new feedback practices that are more in line with learners’ needs.

21In the last contribution of the Festschrift, four of Sabine De Knop’s colleagues at the Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles (USL-B), Jennifer Thewissen, Tanja Temmerman, Arnaud Vincent & Justine Gauthier, present some pedagogical activities which were implemented in their English and Dutch language courses during the Covid 19 pandemic. The resulting lockdown has presented numerous pedagogical challenges and pushed many teachers to distance themselves from traditional teacher-led teaching methods. The authors present three types of pedagogical approaches which they actively implemented and which aimed at ensuring student engagement in online teaching, namely inquiry-based learning, online collaborative learning and learning through gamification. These three methods ultimately led the authors to reassess the teacher’s role and the importance of interaction in maintaining learning engagement: “it is no understatement to say that the pandemic forced us to reassess our own practices and determine how to improve them” (Thewissen et al. in this volume, 319).

22The present volume contains a wide variety of contributions, both in terms of the topics covered and the methodologies adopted. However, the 13 contributions have one characteristic in common: they are all closely related to the research topics to which Professor Sabine De Knop has contributed throughout her career. This Festschrift is published on the occasion of the emerita status awarded to her, but it is not an end in itself. Sabine De Knop is constantly inspired by the language that surrounds her and her intellectual curiosity will undoubtedly continue to thrive. We can be certain that she will keep a close eye on language and continue to be amazed by the many typological differences between German and French. She will always be keen to highlight headlines in newspapers (cf. Fig. 1) and smile at the use of typical German constructions or German posture verbs.

Figure 1. German construction in the Hamburger Abendblatt (09.02.2021) highlighted by Sabine De Knop