Dagmar Divjak (born 1975) is a linguist who is professor at the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

, specializing in

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

and

cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are cons ...

Education, career and honours

Divjak studied at

KU Leuven KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its mai ...

. She initially studied East European Languages & Cultures, receiving a BA in 1995 and an MA in 1997 along with an MA in Academic Teacher Training. After a study visit to the

Jagiellonian University The Jagiellonian University (, UJ) is a public research university in Kraków, Poland. Founded in 1364 by Casimir III the Great, King Casimir III the Great, it is the oldest university in Poland and one of the List of oldest universities in con ...

Kraków , officially the Royal Capital City of Kraków, is the List of cities and towns in Poland, second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city has a population of 804,237 ...

in 1998, she pursued a PhD in East European Languages and Cultures along with Linguistics, which was awarded in 2004; the title of her doctoral dissertation was ''Degrees of Verb Integration: Conceptualizing and Categorizing Events in Russian''. After her doctorate she held postdoctoral positions at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

(2004–5) and at

(2005–6). In 2006 she took up a position as lecturer at the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

, where she was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011, Reader in 2012, and full professor in 2018. Since 2019 she has been Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the

. Divjak has served as vice-president (2010–2014) and then president (2014–2017) of the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association. In 2020 she was elected ordinary member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

Research

Divjak's research agenda is to achieve a better understanding of how the structures and patterns we observe in language emerge from human and individual cognitive capacities. Her approach can be situated within usage-based and

. She has worked on topics in

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

lexical semantics Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistics, linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings.Pustejovsky, J. (2005) Lexical Semantics: Overview' in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition, V ...

and

language learning Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and ...

, and has employed methods from

as well as experimental linguistics. Her recent research has received funding from the

British Academy The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the sa ...

and the

Leverhulme Trust The Leverhulme Trust () is a large national grant-making organisation in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1925 under the will of the 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), with the instruction that its resources should be used to cover ...

Selected publications

* Divjak, Dagmar & Stefan T. Gries. 2006. Ways of trying in Russian: clustering behavioral profiles. ''Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory'' 2 (1), 23–60. * Gries, Stefan T. & Dagmar Divjak. 2009. Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based approach to cognitive semantic analysis. In Vyvyan Evans & Stephanie Pourcel (eds.), ''New directions in cognitive linguistics'', 57–75. * Divjak, Dagmar. 2010. ''Structuring the lexicon: a clustered model for near-synonymy.'' Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. * Divjak, Dagmar, & Antti Arppe. 2013. Extracting prototypes from exemplars: What can corpus data tell us about concept representation? ''Cognitive Linguistics'' 24 (2), 221–274. * Dabrowska, Ewa, & Dagmar Divjak (eds.). 2015. ''Handbook of cognitive linguistics.'' Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. * Divjak, Dagmar. 2019. ''Frequency in language: memory, attention and learning.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Divjak, Dagmar Living people KU Leuven alumni Academics of the University of Birmingham Members of Academia Europaea Women linguists Corpus linguists Cognitive linguists 1975 births