The main topic of this issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics, semantic change, is probably one of the areas of linguistic research gaining more prominence over the last years. This fact is possibly due to two circumstances. a) On the one hand, to the development of the meaning-oriented and usage-based approaches to lan- guage, which take place mainly (although not exclusively) within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. And, b) on the other, to the development of text corpora (representing both Old and Contemporary language in written or oral form), driven by the necessity to approach the communicative language usage.
The present issue of Catalan Journal of Linguistics gathers contributions on the main topics related to contemporary semantics: a) polysemy, polysemysation, synonymy, semantic and lexical lectal variation; b) metaphor and metonymy, subjectivation and intersubjectivation as mechanisms and factors of semantic change, respec- tively; c) pragmatic inference as a true trigger of semantic change; d) emergence, understanding, spreading and semantization of new meanings; e) grammaticalization, phraseologization and constructionalization as semantic changes; and, finally, f) inner (paradigmatic relations) and outer conditions (pragmatic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors) of semantic change. Grammaticalization, the Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC), Prototypicality Effects, pragmatic enrichment, the Theory of Conceptual Blending and image schemas constitute the theoreti- cal background of these ten papers, where concrete cases of semantic change in Catalan, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are analysed.

The origin of this volume is the Workshop on Exceptionality in Phonology, which was held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona the 27 of January 2015 as part of the 12th Old World Conference in Phonology, and which featured Kie Zuraw (UCLA) as keynote speaker. From the seven talks that were presented at the Workshop, six appear in this volume, and one more paper that was not presented at the Workshop has also been included. The papers presented in this monographic volume are not meant to cover the totality of theoretical approaches and research activities on the topic at hand, which is certainly a very broad topic, but to present up-to-date work by leading phonologists on a topic that is a long-debated problem for phonological theory.