Maria Flaksman is a Lecturer at Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg where she teaches various courses on etymology, historical lexicology, historical morphology, Old and Middle English. She obtained her PhD from the University of St. Petersburg in 2015. She is an Alexander von Humboldt (2019-2021) and DAAD (2012-2013) research fellow and an Icelandic Government Scholarship holder (2017-2018). She specialises in onomatopoeia, lexical iconicity, history of the English language, Germanic languages, and etymology. Maria Flaksman is the compiler of An Etymological Dictionary of English Imitative Words (Peter Lang, 2024) and author of a monograph English iconic lexicon in synchrony and diachrony (2015) and collective monograph Phonosemantics: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2022) and of numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals. She supervises PhD students, organizes workshops and conferences on language iconicity, edits and reviews publications on onomatopoeia and ideophones. She is the author of the iconic treadmill hypothesis, classification of imitative words according to de-iconization stages (degree of form-meaning similarity loss), and of the classification of sound changes according to their impact on onomatopoeic words.
Alexandra Bagasheva is a Professor of General and Cognitive Linguistics and head of the Department of English and American Studies, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria. She teaches of host of linguistic subjects at all three levels (BA, MA and PhD). Her main areas of interest and research are word-formation; cognitive linguistics; contrastive linguistics; semiotics; construction grammar. The majority of her publications are in the areas of word-formation and lexical semantics, with issues of iconicity and sound symbolism figuring prominently. She has organized various scientific event among which Workshop “Boundaries and continua in affixation: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives”, within the Word-Formation Theories VII & Typology and Universals in Word-Formation VI Conference; Chair of The 5th International Conference on Figurative Thought and Language (FTL5) Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridsky"; Workshop “Revisiting paradigms in word-formation”, framed within the Word-Formation Theories III – Typology and Universals in Word-Formation IV Conference. She is a member of the editorial boards or advisory boards of a number international journals in her field of scientific expertise. She is a reviewer for number of series and journals. Her latest monograph is 2022 Prototypes, metonymy and word formation. Sofia: Polis Publishing.
Maruszka Eve-Marie Meinard currently teaches various courses in linguistics (syntax, semantics, contrastive linguistics) at University of Lille (France) in the Language Sciences Department. She has defended a PhD in Linguistics at Lumière Lyon II University (France) in 2021. In her dissertation, The Challenge of Defining Interjections and Onomatopoeias, she has developed a methodological approach aimed at finding (at least some of the) definitional features that characterize interjections, onomatopoeias and filler words. She is currently taking part in an online onomatopoeia dictionary project (OTPS) where the theoretical framework she has developed to describe and classify onomatopoeias is applied. The dictionary project is directed by Prof. Sophie Saffi and Stephane Pages within the CAER laboratory (Aix-Marseille University, France). While she is still working on these parts of speech, she is extending her research questions to reported speech and its semiotic and syntactic status. She has worked as an ATER (Temporary Teaching and Research Assistant) at University of Pau (France) and University of Lille and has also worked as contract teacher at University of Grenoble (France).