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prof. dr. Alan Cienki

Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Language, Literature and Communication

Personal information

Professor Emeritus of Language Use & Cognition and English Linguistics
(Hoogleraar Emeritus Taalgebruik & Cognitie en Engelse Taalkunde)
(Note: I am no longer accepting PhD candidates)

President (2025–27), International Society for Gesture Studies

Founder of:
– the MA track at the VU in CIS: Multimodal Communication
– the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab ("Polimod")
at the Centre for Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies ("SCoDis"),
Moscow State Linguistic University, Russian Federation

Research

Cognitive linguistics; semantics and conceptualization; gesture studies; multimodal communication; grammar of spoken language; metaphor studies; comparative/contrastive linguistics

Grants

Selection:
Visiting professor, Dept. of Letters and Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy (April 2026)
Netherlands Science Foundation/NWO (2012-16, 2025-present)
PhD candidates via China Scholarship Council (2012-2024)
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10, 2024)
Russian Science Foundation (2014-16, 2017-18, 2019-21)
Cinepoetics, FU Berlin (2016)

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Ancillary activities are updated daily

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Research/publications Amsterdam UMC
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