General acknowledgments

Due to the celebratory nature of this book, gratitude has a central place in it. We are grateful to the contributors, for the exciting mix of frameworks, ideas, and methods that they were willing to present and develop on relatively short notice in honour of Kristin Davidse’s retirement. The response to our initial invitations was overwhelming, and almost everyone was immediately happy to contribute – and ultimately did contribute. Regretfully, time considerations precluded some from contributing. Time considerations also meant that those who did contribute had to write and revise their contributions under considerable pressure. We are grateful to the authors for meeting the deadlines.

Besides the contributors of the volume who agreed to function as internal referees, we are grateful to the external referees for their generous insights and advice: heartfelt thanks go out to – in alphabetical order – Jóhanna Barðdal, Peter Collins, Hendrik De Smet, Hilde Hanegreefs, Niklas Erben Johansson, Andreas Jucker, Magnus Levin, Lachlan Mackenzie, Peter Petré, Jean-Christophe Verstraete, and Bram Vertommen.

We are grateful to Kees Vaes and Elly van Gelderen for their enthusiasm and for all the support they have offered throughout the editing process.

And last but not least, we are obviously very grateful to Kristin. This edited volume was conceived as a small scientific and personal token of our appreciation to her – appreciation for her insightful ways of distilling the best out of various functional-cognitive frameworks and for her contributions to linguistic theory, description and didactics, but also for her exceptional kindness, openness, and generosity as a person. We are personally very grateful to have Kristin in our lives and look forward to all the insights she undoubtedly still has in store for us and for the scientific community. Thank you!