Principal Investigator

Silva Ladewig is interested in the embodied nature of language, which she approaches by studying multimodality from a linguistic perspective in the fields of Pragmatics, Cognitive Grammar, and Dynamic Multimodal Communication. Her work focuses in particular on stabilization processes in gestures and on the interface between gesture and sign, which she investigated at the Sign Language Lab at the University of Göttingen as part of the DFG project “Stabilization Processes in Gestures: A Media-Specific and Cross-Modal Approach.” She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the European University Viadrina in 2012, where she contributed to numerous interdisciplinary projects on the integration of gesture and speech, the linguistic potential of gestures, and the dynamics of multimodal metaphors. In April 2025, she habilitated at the University of Göttingen, where she is now Principal Investigator of the DFG project “Towards a Morphology of Recurrent Gestures.“