Professor Ewa Dabrowska

Biography

I am a native of Gdańsk and was educated in Poland, the US, and the UK. I have also spent some time in Germany (working at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig) and in Japan. I joined the Department of Humanities at Northumbria in 2009, having previously taught at the universities of Sheffield, Sussex, Glasgow, and Gdańsk.  I am 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.

Teaching Interests

I have taught courses in language acquisition, psycholinguistics, syntax and semantics at various levels and in various institutional settings. I have also taught a number of short research methods courses and masterclasses externally. Currently I teach a first year module on research methods in linguistics (called ‘Doing Linguistics’), a second year module on Psycholinguistics, and a third year module entitled Cognitive Approaches to Language Acquisition.

Research Interests

My research covers three main areas: cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.  I am 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 my work to date has focussed on morphology and syntax – in particular, case, interrogative constructions, and passives – I am also interested in lexical semantics.

At the moment, I am 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 my 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 my earlier work I focussed primarily on documenting the extent of individual differences in grammatical knowledge, since so many linguists deny their existence; more recently, I have 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.

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised PhD projects dealing individual differences in native language attainment, lexical semantics, and metaphor. I particularly welcome applications from students interested in language acquisition and empirical investigations of speakers’ linguistic knowledge.

Funding Awards

Questions with long-distance dependencies (AHRC Research Leave Scheme 2007)

Crosslinguistic differences in sentence comprehension (Visiting Professorship for Magdalena Smoczyńska; co-applicant with Marcin Szczerbiński, Leverhulme 2006)

Language, Mind and Brain (AHRB Research Leave Scheme 2003)

An experimental study of the acquisition of Polish case inflections (British Academy, 2002)

Polish Database Project (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2000)

Affiliations and Memberships

AHRC Peer Review College  

Linguistic Society of America

International Association for the Study of Child Language

International Cognitive Linguistics Association (member of Governing Board)

UK Cognitive Linguistics Association (Vice-President)

Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association (Honorary Member)

Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association

Selected publications

"Questions with long-distance dependencies: A usage-based perspective". Cognitive Linguistics 19:3, 391-425 (2008). [Download]

“The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult native speakers’ productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology”. Journal of Memory and Language 58, 931-951 (2008). [Download]

Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh and Georgetown University Press, Georgetown (2004)

“From formula to schema: The acquisition of English questions.” Cognitive Linguistics 11, 83-102 (2000). [Download]

Cognitive Semantics and the Polish Dative. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York (1997).

Full Publication List