INTERNATIONAL COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE 10-14 July 2017 Tartu, Estonia
Plenary speakers
Dagmar Divjak, University of Sheffield, UK
Dr. Dagmar Divjak is the Director of the Centre for Linguistic Research and of the HumLab for research in language, music and cognition at the University of Sheffield (UK). She has a PhD in Russian Linguistics from the KULeuven (2004) and is a Reader in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. Among her other distinguished duties she is president of the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (SCLA), co-editor of De Gruyter’s Cognitive Linguistic Research book series, Associate Editor of Cognitive Linguistics and sits on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Linguistics.
In her research she explores how our cognitive capacities give rise to the patterns and structures we see in language. In addition, she is interested in charting what language has to offer the learner in his/her quest for meaning. She has her background in usage-based cognitive linguistics and because of this, frequency plays a central role in her work.
Together with E. Dąbrowska Dr. Divjak has edited the Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (De Gruyter; 2010) and she is currently working on a book titled Frequency in Language. Context, Memory and Attention to be published in 2018.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/russian/staff/profiles/divjakd
Nick C. Ellis, University of Michigan, USA
Prof. Nick C. Ellis is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics and a Research Scientist at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan. He also serves as the General Editor of Language Learning. His wide range of research interests include first, second and foreign language acquisition, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, computational modelling and cognitive linguistics.
He is currently working on the different roles of explicit and implicit learning in language knowledge and processing, usage-based acquisition and the probabilistic tuning of the language system, and the applications of psychological theory in language testing and language instruction. His most recent book publication is Usage-based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Processing: Cognitive and Corpus Investigations of Construction Grammar (2016, with Ute Römer and Matthew Brook O’Donnell).
He has also edited a number of books, including Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (2008, with Peter Robinson) and Language as a Complex Adaptive System (2009, with Diane Larsen-Freeman).
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ncellis/NickEllis/Home.html
Presentation: “Usage-based approaches to Language, Language Acquisition, and Language Processing“
Laura A. Janda, University of Tromsø, Norway
Laura A. Janda is a Professor of Russian Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her main research interests are Russian, Slavic languages, morphology and aspect. Since moving to Norway, she has begun working on North Saami and has several scholarly publications on that language as well.
She has taught many courses at different universities in the US and Norway, including Russian, Czech, Cognitive Linguistics, and Quantitative Methods in Linguistics.
Her most recent book publication is Why Russian aspectual prefixes aren’t empty: prefixes as verb classifiers (2013, co-authored with Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashevskaya, Anastasia Makarova, Tore Nesset, Svetlana Sokolova). She has also edited a number of books, including Cognitive Linguistics: The Quantitative Turn. The Essential Reader (2013) and Slavic Linguistics in a Cognitive Framework (2011), and is Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics. She is a past president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. In 2014 she helped to launch TROLLing, the Tromsø Repository Of Language And Linguistics, an international publicly accessible archive for the sharing of linguistic data and statistical analysis available at opendata.uit.no.
Currently Laura Janda is working on several projects, including the Russian Constructicon (a multinational project coordinated with the building of constructicons for other languages), and corpus- and experiment-based investigations of aspect in Russian.
http://ansatte.uit.no/laura.janda/
Presentation: “Aspects of Aspect”
Ronald W. Langacker, University of California, San Diego, USA
Ronald W. Langacker is Research Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor in the Department of Linguistics from 1966 to 2003. He is one of the pioneers and leading figures of Cognitive Linguistics and the creator of the Cognitive Grammar framework, which has shaped a considerable amount of research and has been applied to a wide range of linguistic phenomena in various languages and language families. He is one of the founders of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, served as its president from 1997 until 1999, and belongs to the editorial/advisory boards of numerous cognitive linguistics publications.
Ronald Langacker’s primary research interest is the semantic and grammatical organization of language, but early in his career major efforts were devoted to describing and reconstructing the Uto-Aztecan family of Native American languages.
Some notable works are the seminal Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1987 and 1991), Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar (1991), Grammar and Conceptualization (1999), and Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction (2008).
Presentation: “Functions and Assemblies”
Asifa Majid, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Asifa Majid is Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition at the Center for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is also an affiliated principal investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Glasgow.
Her research focuses on the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them. She is currently working on the study of olfactory language and cognition across diverse cultures and within specialist communities such as wine, coffee and herb experts. Among other topics, her current research tackles the relationship between language and odor memory and synaesthetic associations between odor and the other senses.
http://meaningculturecognition.ruhosting.nl/people/asifa-majid/
Presentation: “The senses at the intersection of language, culture, and biology”
John Newman, University of Alberta, Canada
John Newman holds the position of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta and is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, Monash University, Australia.
John’s research interests are quite broad and include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, typology, and in an earlier life phonology (including a textbook on Feature Geometry). John has published on a diverse range of languages —Germanic, Sinitic (especially Chinese dialects), and Austronesian— and has carried out fieldwork in Sarawak in (Malaysia), Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea) and in Alberta, Canada.
For some years, John has been engaged in cross-linguistic research on verbal concepts, resulting in a number of book-length publications and journal articles on this topic. The names of some of the journals in which he has published speak to the diversity of his interests: Oceanic Linguistics, the Journal of Philippine Linguistics, the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, and the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science.
As members of the ICLA will know, John is the Editor-in-Chief of our journal Cognitive Linguistics, He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Presentation: “EAT, DRINK, MAN, WOMAN and all that: The linguistics of ordinary human experience”
