Carita Paradis

Carita Paradis (born 1953) is a Swedish linguist, and Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lund University.

Her research is focused on the dynamics of meaning-making in human communication. Within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, her works highlight the meaningful functioning of language in all its guises and all its uses when people communicate with one another. She is best known for her work on meanings related to degree, opposition and stance-taking in human communication. She has authored/co-authored and edited several books, including Degree Modifiers of Adjectives in Spoken British English, Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity, The Construal of Spatial Meaning: Windows into Conceptual Space, Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures, and Advice in Conversation: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Corpus Pragmatics.

Paradis is a Member and former President of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund, and a Member of Academia Europaea. She has served as the Chair of the Scientific Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and of Linguistics at The Swedish Research Council and an expert at the European Research Council. She is Editor of Cognitive Linguistics in Practice book series.

Career Upon receiving her Doctoral degree from Lund University, Paradis started her academic career as a Research fellow at Lund University in 1997. In the following year, she also held an appointment as a Senior lecturer, and served on this position until 2005. She was then appointed Full Professor of English Linguistics at Linnaeus University, before rejoining Lund University in 2010 as Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics, and Manager of Research and Research Education. While employing different empirical methods – corpus and computational techniques as well as experimental techniques, she explores what linguistic expressions reveal about human interactive behaviour, perception and cognition, and inversely how they influence and give rise to patterns and structures in natural language use.

Paradis has been engaged in several collaborative projects both within the language sciences and other academic disciplines such as cognitive psychology, cognitive science and computer science. Interdisciplinary projects that she has participated in over the past decades include Antonomy in language, thought and memory, How the human mind makes sense of contraries in everyday life, MoveEinG, Language for sensory perceptions. Between 2013 and 2017, she was one of three research leaders of the StaViCTA framework project, analyzing and visualizing stance in large data sets. She has also served as a member of the steering committee of NetWordS from 2011 to 2015, funded by European Science Foundation, and the Linnaeus Centre Thinking in time: Cognition, Cognition and Learning (CCL) funded by the Swedish Research Council (2008–2018).

By way of creating data sets for open access to the academic community, Paradis has been involved in the compilation of a new corpus of spoken language, namely the London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2), which is a half-a-million-word corpus with accompanying sound files of speech by adult speakers of British English from 2014 to 2019. The corpus is a follow-up on the worlds’ first machine-readable corpus of spoken language, namely the London–Lund Corpus (LLC-1), which was compiled approximately half a century earlier.

Awards and honors 1999 – President's Prize for the best post-doc paper, the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) 2003 – Member, The New Society of Letters, Lund (Vetenskapssocieteten) 2014 – Member, The Royal Society of Letters, Lund 2014 – Member, AcademiaNet - Database of Outstanding Women Scientists in Europe 2016 – Member, Academia Europaea 2019–2021 – President, The Royal Society of Letters, Lund 2021 – Special Prize for prominent research achievements from Einar Hansen's Research Foundation