The journal Language and Cognition is pleased to welcome a new Editor-in-Chief, Stefan Hartmann, from 2024. L&C is grateful to departing Editor-in-Chief Bodo Winter for many years of service to the journal. To learn more about Stefan Hartmann and upcoming plans for the journal, we invite you to read the interview below.

Q1: What’s your history with Language and Cognition?

I have been following L&C for many years, probably since I attended my first UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference in London more than ten years ago. L&C was one of the first journals that also explored the intersection of cognitive linguistics and language evolution research, which is something that I’m also very much interested in. When I joined a project on constructional patterns in multilingual first language acquisition, we chose L&C as the publication venue for one of the first papers emerging from that project. In late 2021, I came across an open call for general editors – I thought that this might be an interesting challenge and nominated myself. So in early 2022, I joined the board of general editors. In late 2023, I came across the open call for editor-in-chief – I thought that this might be an interesting challenge, too, and, well, here we are now…

Q2: What future directions (or initiatives) are you most looking forward to explore for Language and Cognition in the coming years?

The journal has experienced some exciting developments under the stewardship of the previous editor-in-chief, Bodo Winter, and I’m very much looking forward to continuing the course that he charted: Firstly, L&C has started to promote open science more thoroughly by introducing an open data and materials policy. Also, we have introduced registered reports as a new article type. In a registered report, authors describe the design of a study in detail, and the paper is peer-reviewed before the actual study is conducted. One of my goals is to encourage more colleagues to submit registered reports to L&C – it’s a challenging article type because you need to have a very clear idea of what you are going to do, but this is exactly what it makes so valuable and exciting.

Secondly, L&C has switched to a more transparent system when it comes to the recruitment of general editors in recent years, by issuing open calls whenever the term of one or more general editors ends. This is something that I definitely want to continue. Thirdly, since summer 2023, all papers accepted for publication in L&C are open access, which will certainly contribute significantly to the success of the journal.

Apart from continuing what Bodo started, I would also like to broaden the spectrum of research published in the journal by encouraging more submissions from research fields that are highly relevant to cognitive linguistics but perhaps less prominently represented at cognitive-linguistic conferences and in cognitive-linguistic publications. For example, my own research areas include historical linguistics and grapholinguistics, i.e. the study of written language, both of which are highly relevant for understanding the dynamics and cultural evolution of language.

What I’m looking forward to most, however, is working with an excellent team of general editors, as well as with our journal manager Kinga Patterson. As editor-in-chief, I may have a fancy title now, but it is really all of us who are running the journal together, with me just being “primus inter pares”.

Q3: What types of research are you hoping to publish in Language and Cognition?

L&C has sharpened its profile in recent years by putting an emphasis on empirical research: We publish high-quality empirical (usually quantitative) research on the relationship between language and cognition, broadly construed. This includes, for example, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research, but also corpus-based studies on language dynamics that can have valuable implications for understanding how language is organized in the mind. Recent research in cognitive linguistics has also emphasized the relevance of social and cultural context as well as of individual differences for understanding the cognitive organization of language – as such, we also welcome e.g. sociolinguistic research as long as it is empirically-based and has cognitive implications. I hope that we will continue to receive as much high-quality research from colleagues around the world as we did in recent years.

Q4: What are some of the most exciting articles Language and Cognition has recently published?

It would be hard to pick one – instead, I will mention the special issues that L&C has recently published, one on iconicity, one on time concepts, which really showcase the breadth of research that the journal stands for. Also, I know that there are some exciting special issues in the pipeline, and new special issue proposals are always welcome!

Stefan Hartmann received his PhD in 2015 at the University of Mainz, Germany. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Hamburg and Bamberg before joining Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf as an associate professor in 2020. His research interests include cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and language evolution research.

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