学术活动发布与订制系统

Ewa Dąbrowska received her PhD from the University of Gdańsk in 1995. Since then she has taught at the universities of Gdańsk, Glasgow, Sussex, Sheffield, and, since 2009, Northumbria. She is the editor of Cognitive Linguistics, member of the Editorial Board of Trends in Language Acquisition Research, Vice President of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association, and a member of the Governing Board of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and the AHRC Peer Review College.

Her research covers three main areas: cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition. She is interested in what native speakers know about the grammar of their language, how they come to know it, and how this knowledge differs across individuals. While most of her work to date has focused on morphology and syntax – in particular, case, interrogative constructions, and passives – she is also interested in lexical semantics.

At the moment, she is involved in two main projects. The first of these concerns the acquisition of descriptive verbs such waddle, peer, or gape. Such verbs are relatively infrequent and occur predominantly in written texts, and thus raise some interesting learnability issues: since the referents are not present when we encounter them, how do we work out what they mean? The second is a continuation of her earlier work on individual differences in native language attainment. This is a rather controversial area which has been largely neglected by linguists, in spite of its immense social implications. In her earlier work she focused primarily on documenting the extent of individual differences in grammatical knowledge, since so many linguists deny their existence; more recently, she has been trying to determine to what extent they are cognitive and motivational factors (such as IQ, working memory capacity, and need for cognition) and to linguistic experience, and in particular, the amount of exposure to written texts.