Adele Goldberg is presently Professor of Linguistics at Princeton University. Her research interest is the interrelation between language and cognition, especially the processing and acquisition of linguistic constructions.

Adele Goldberg studied Mathematics and Philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, and earned a Ph.D. in  Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. She taught at the University of California San Diego and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before moving to Princeton in 2004. Since 2011 she is an Einstein visiting professor at the cluster "Languages of Emotion" of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Research Profile

Adele Goldberg is one of rather few linguists who combines innovative theory development in the core field of linguistics, i.e. grammar and theory of grammar, with a developmental perspective and a hands on expertise in psycholinguistic methods – as her numerous papers in prestigious journals and her books "Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language" (Oxford University Press 2006), and "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure" (University of Chicago Press, 1995) demonstrate.

Her approach to grammar is exceptionally well suited to pursue one of the clusters' core topics, the relation between language, cognition, and emotion. Furthermore, her approach is suited to fill a gaping lacuna in current research: grammar, as one of the cornerstones of linguistic competence, has until now been related almost exclusively to cognitive functions. While theoretical and empirical work on prosodic, lexical or discourse aspects of the languages of emotion has increased at least in quantity in recent years, there is still virtually no research on the relation between grammar and emotion.

Projects at the Cluster Languages of Emotion

Adele Goldberg bridges this gap by extending her internationally widely renowned linguistic as well as psycholinguistic work on grammar as a network of constructions to the field of emotions. She has outlined a cluster-project on neural correlates of and emotional effects on construction learning; in addition she has started a project on embodied metaphors, scrutinizing central arguments of embodied cognition and language research; she also contributes to the developmental perspective, pursued in one of the clusters' area in doing research on emotion word learning.

We envision Adele Goldberg's research group at the core of our cluster to contribute significantly to our ongoing and cross-disciplinary work on the interrelation between sign practices and emotions.

Awards

She has received several awards, among them a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study of Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University (2003-2004), and was invited to give the highly prestigious "Nijmegen Lectures" at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in 2007.

As a further reflection of her high international standing in interdisciplinary science, she is acting as editorial board member or guest editor for several linguistic journals. She was Chief Editor of "Cognitive Linguistics" (Mouton Publishing) from 2004 to 2007.