Barbara Dancygier

Dr. Barbara Dancygier specializes in cognitive approaches to language, literary discourse, and multimodal artifacts. As a cognitive linguist, she worked extensively on conditional constructions in English, reflexive constructions in Polish, and also on negation and intersubjective meanings. In the last few years, she has focused on formulating a new, language-based model for the analysis of meaning emergence in fiction. Her most recent book, The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach, co-edited with Eve Sweetser, extends the study of cognitive and semantic processes into various communicative modalities. She is interested in meaning emergence processes, especially in contexts where language interacts with other modalities.

Dr. Dancygier completed her MA and PhD at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, where she also worked as a faculty member until 1992. After an extended research affiliation with the University of California, Berkeley (Linguistics and Cognitive Science), she taught at Simon Fraser University (Linguistics). In 2002, she joined the English Department at UBC, where she is now full professor. She was a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley in 1991-1993 and holds a UBC Killam Research prize.