First and foremost, I want to express my sincere gratitude to prof. Fuyin (Thomas) Li for inviting me to present these ten lectures in Beijing in the winter of 2019. Coming to Beijing has been a wonderful and unforgettable experience. Meeting the participants of the Cognitive Linguistics Forum has been a great privilege. The ten lectures that I gave as part of the Forum were based on my own previous work as well as on research that has informed my general outlook on language, which is cognitive, usage-based, connected to corpus-based and experimental research methods, and indebted to the idea that many characteristics of language can be understood more fully once they are framed in a diachronic perspective. Understanding how language works in the here-and-now requires us to think about how it came to be that way, and conversely, examining the cognitive and social pressures that shape language use can help us understand why language changes diachronically in the way it does. The invitation to give the Beijing Forum lectures gave me the exciting opportunity to draw together the main lines of my research and to try and communicate the bigger picture that unites the individual studies. I thank the students and colleagues in the audience for their questions and their feedback, and I hope that the ideas presented in the lectures will help them in coming up with answers to the questions that arise in their own research, and in our common endeavor of understanding language and languages. Now that the lectures have been turned into a book, I hope the same for its readership.
I wholeheartedly thank the team of student volunteers who have been supporting the organization of the lectures, transcribing them, and helping to turn the transcripts into the present book: Na (Selina) Liu, Xiaoran (Kara) Zhou, Quting (Daisy) Zhang, Jing (Milly) Du, Mengmin (Amy) Xu, Lin (Joyce) Yu, Guannan (Vivian) Zhao and Junjie (Jim) Lu. Not only were they highly dedicated and successful in their efforts to make the lectures run smoothly, they were also kind and considerate in showing me around on campus and in the city, as well as helping me find my own way when I felt like it. Moreover, they were very knowledgeable, open and invigorating in their interactions with professors and speakers. I wish them all lots of success in their careers, and I look forward to seeing them again very soon.
I would like to acknowledge the generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation that was provided for research that is reported on in this book (SNF Grant 100015_149176/1, SNF Grant 100012L/169490/1).
Martin Hilpert
25 February, 2020