Plenary Speakers

Alan Cienki is Professor of Language Use and Cognition at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and also Director of the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab (known as “PoliMod”) at Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia, where he is currently principal investigator on a grant from the Russian Science Foundation on “Verbal and co-verbal means of event construal across languages”. Previously, he worked at Emory University, Atlanta, USA, where he co-founded the Program in Linguistics. He has served as chair of the association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) and as Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS). He co-edited the two-volume handbook on Body-Language-Communication (Mouton, 2013, 2014) and the book Metaphor and Gesture (Benjamins, 2008). His Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics from the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics were recently published by Brill (2017).

Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is Founding Director of the Cognitive Science Network; Co-Director of the Red Hen Lab; winner of the Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, winner of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises from the French Academy; Founding President of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts; Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Science of Origins; Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität; External Research Professor of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study.

Eve Sweetser is Professor of Linguistics at University of Berkeley, California. She has longstanding research interests in metaphor and iconicity, in viewpoint and multimodal communication, and in cognitive models of syntax and semantics. The Matrix Metaphor group is currently working on analyses of metaphor in medical discourse, using corpus-based approaches. Other current ongoing projects include one on the relationship between English if-conditional constructions and co-speech gesture, one on simultaneous multiple viewpoints in co-speech gesture, and one on categorization of factors contributing to viewpoint interpretation in gesture. She has also worked on construction grammar (particularly of conditionals), poetics, cognitive linguistics of rhyme and meter, interaction of iconicity and metaphor, and on metaphor in religious architecture.

Lilian Ferrari is Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil. She is chair of the Laboratory of Cognitive Linguistics (LINC) at the same university. Her primary research interests are cognitive linguistics, subjectivity and viewpoint, conditionals and deixis. She has published an introductory book on Cognitive Linguistics (Introdução à Linguística Cognitiva, Ed. Contexto, 2011), and coedited two books – one on Cognitive Linguistics (Álvaro e Ferrari, Linguística Cognitiva: da linguagem aos bastidores da mente, 2016), and the other on general linguistics (França, Ferrari & Maia, A Linguística no Século XXI; convergências e divergências no estudo da linguagem, Contexto, 2016).