Paola Vernillo

I am a post-doctoral researcher (project "ABSTRACTION: Unlocking Meaning from Experience through Language" - ERC 2021) and lecturer in General Linguistics (LILEC - Unibo).

In my research, I adopt a cognitive approach to the study of language, with a specific focus on metaphors and their use for the representation of abstract concepts. I participated in national and international research projects, including MODELACT (MIUR - Futuro in Ricerca 2012), IMPAQTS "Implicit Manipulation in Politics: Quantitively Assessing the Tendentiousness of Speeches" (PRIN 2017), MetaphAN "Semantic Biomarkers of Anorexia Nervosa" [MUR (Ministerial Decree 737/2021) – AlmaIdea 2022], and EPICA "Empowering Public Interest Communication with Argumentation (PRIN 2022). I am the P.I. of the project "How about metaphors for dinner? A digest of metaphorical conceptualizations in pro-ana communities" (RaAM Research Grant 2022) and a member of the Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics – LLiS "R. Carati" (FICLIT - Unibo).