Marianna Marcella Bolognesi

Marianna Marcella Bolognesi is Full Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna.

Her research, at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics, investigates how language shapes meaning at different levels of abstraction. She is an expert in metaphor theory and multimodality, distributional semantics, and human versus LLM representations. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project ABSTRACTION (€1.4M), leading an interdisciplinary team of linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, and was Vice-PI of the PRIN 2022 project WEMB (2023–2026).

Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the University of Oxford, also as Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College. She has published three monographs (Cambridge UP, Routledge, Benjamins) and articles in linguistics, cognitive science and NLP venues, including Cognition, Nature Machine Intelligence and ACL.