Monika Schwarz-Friesel was born in 1961, and at present she is Professor of General Linguistics at the Technical University Berlin.
She is one of the pioneers of cognitive linguistics, and at the same time, the founder of cognitive approaches to German linguistics. She belongs to those outstanding scholars who are capable of exerting direct influence on the development of her discipline. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had made a name for herself as the author of her foundational monograph entitled Einführung in die Kognitive Linguistik (Tübingen, 1992) which played a substantial role in the establishment of European cognitive linguistics.
She achieved seminal results in anaphora-research, text linguistics and the cognitive linguistic investigation of the relationship between language and emotion. Her recent findings – that raised wide international interest in the media beyond linguistics – witness the applicability of basic research in cognitive linguistics to deeply rooted social problems. Thus, she investigated the language of terrorism, the cognitive structures underlying the language of antisemitism and the conceptualizations of violence. Her 9 monographs, 7 collections of papers and many dozens of papers appeared in renowned international publications.
There has been a close scientific cooperation between Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel and the University of Debrecen for two decades as documented, among other things, in joint publications and fellowships.