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Stela Manova's Homepage

About me

I am a cognitive-science linguist with a strong background in mathematics. My PhD degree is in General Linguistics (with a minor in Slavic Linguistics) and I obtained it from the University of Vienna where I also did my postdoc and senior postdoc in Slavic Studies (linguistic orientation). 

​I investigate the structure and meaning of words, phrases and sentences from a theoretical, typological and cognitive perspective.​ My work is cross-linguistic and I have carried out research on: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Ukrainian.

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My projects have been supported by: Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austrian National Bank (OeNB), Erste Bank (Die Erste) - Vienna, Mayor of Vienna, University of Vienna, European Science Foundation (ESF), SNS Pisa (Italy), Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, Junta de Andalucía (Spain), and private sponsors.
Research interests
  • Language and cognition
  • Theoretical linguistics / Language modelling / NLP
  • Experimental linguistics / Psycholinguistics / (Foreign) language learning
  • Computational linguistics
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Statistics 
  • Algorithms and data structures
  • Complexity measuring of linguistic analyses
  • Programming languages (Java, Python, C++, C, JavaScript, HTML, R, among others)

Current research 

I lead a few international projects. You can learn more about my research activities here. 

My most recent project is Language Modeling with N-Grams: The End-to-end N-Gram Model (EteNGraM). This paper introduces EteNGraM, a toy model for NLP. EteNGraM operates only with bigrams and trigrams but appears more efficient than current syntactic models. If you are a linguist, you should try writing texts with n-grams, i.e. based solely on the frequency of occurrence of sequences of word forms, e.g. with the multilingual Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Since 2020, I have also been the main organizer of a series of workshops titled Dissecting Morphological Theory: Diminutivization. The workshops are held in conjunction with different international conferences. You can access the workshop-series website here. 

Besides linguistics, I love math and coding. My favorite mathematician is Carl Friedrich Gauss and I have referred to his ideas for solving problems in morphology and syntax, see these papers: 1, 2, 3. I am also interested in algorithms, data structures, programming languages and complexity measuring, specifically in how to adapt the Big O notation for measuring the complexity of linguistic analyses carried out within different frameworks, i.e. I believe that complexity in both computer science and linguistics is not a property of data but of analysis, and CF Gauss's work is, actually, the best illustration of this claim, see this presentation.

I have profiles on: Research Gate, Google Scholar  and Academia.
​Contact
Middle European Interdisciplinary Master Program in Cognitive Science
University of Vienna
Department of Philosophy
Universitätsstraße 7
1010 Vienna
Austria
Email: stela.manova@univie.ac.at
Web: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova

News

Forthcoming events:
  • Invited speaker at Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF), Department of Linguistics, Princeton University, to be held on 2-3 December 2022. Forum's topic The wheres and whens of affixation.
  • Workshop organizer at the 20th International Morphology Meeting, Budapest, 1-4 Sept. 2022, WS4 Dissecting Morphological Theory 3: Diminutivization, Allomorphy and the Architecture of Grammar. ​

February 2022
Welcome to Kimberly Brosche who joins my lab for a cogsci project on the organization of the mental lexicon of German native and non-native speakers. 

Invitation to take part in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings / THE's Global Academic Reputation Survey.

December 2021
Workshop organizer at the 46th Austrian Linguistics Conference, with Katharina Korecky-Kröll. WS intro here.
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November 2021

The schedule of the workshop Dissecting morphological theory 2: Diminutivization in root-, stem- and word-based morphology is now available, click here. 

Invited speaker, Slavic Studies, Uppsala University.

October 2021
CogSci talk Deriving Language Structure with N-Grams: The End-to-end N-Gram Model - EteNGraM, PDF of the presentation here. 

Welcome to Beata Cséfalvayová who has joined my lab for a cogsci project on diminutivization in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Slovak (and Hungarian). 

September 2021
SLS talk, PDF of the presentation here (with D. Sitchinava).

August 2021
Two-suffix combinations in native and non-native English: Novel evidence for morphomic structures (with G. Knell) in All things morphology: Its independence and its interfaces (Benjamins) is out. 

The workshop Dissecting morphological theory 1: Diminutivization across languages and frameworks takes place online as part of SLE 2021; handout of the workshop intro here (co-authored with B. Arsenijevic, L. Grestenberger & K. Korecky-Kröll) 

SLE-WS-talk slides here (co-authored with D. Sitchinava).

July 2021
The manuscript of The linear order of elements in prominent linguistic sequences: Deriving Tns-Asp-Mood orders and Greenberg’s Universal 20 with n-grams is now on lingbuzz: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/006082.

2nd CFP Dissecting morphological theory 2: Diminutivization in root-, stem- and word-based morphology, workshop to be held in conjunction with the 46th Austrian Linguistics Conference / 46. Österreichische Linguistiktagung (ÖLT) in Vienna on 11-12 December 2021. Abstract submission deadline: 31 July 2021.
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