Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier is a cognitive linguist, working primarily on English.

She has done extensive work on conditional constructions, on the constructional features of stance expressions, and on conceptual underpinnings of figurative language.

She is also interested in the applications of cognitive linguistics to literary discourse, especially in modelling the comprehension of fictional narratives and drama. Her recent project was a study of multimodal artifacts (text and image), which included an analysis of the constructional features of internet memes, as well as an analytical framework for the study of street art, ads, and posters. She is currently interested in applying the study of stance to the understanding of the post-truth phenomena.

In 2012, she received Killam Research Award, and was a Peter Wall Distinguished Scholar in Residence. In 2015, she was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK, and in 2016 she was a visiting Senior Fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Since 2017, she has been the President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.

Research interests: multimodal communication, conceptual study of figuration, construction grammar, cognitive poetics, stance phenomena

Projects: multimodal communication, stance-stacking constructions in language and multimodal discourse, emotional dissonance and the post-truth crisis