DEVYLDER Simon

Simon Devylder received his PhD in English Linguistics from the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in June 2016, under the supervision of Denis Jamet-Coupé. His dissertation examined part-whole expressions of the self in English, based on a corpus of psychotherapy transcripts and online PTSD forums.

 

Following his PhD, he joined the Department of Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University (Sweden) as a postdoctoral researcher (2016–2018) and subsequently as a research director on three externally funded projects (2019–2021), supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Crafoord Foundation. He was then awarded a Marie Sk ?odowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (European Union, 2020–2023) at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT, Tromsø), where he led the MAPS project (Multifactorial Analysis of Possessive Structures in Paamese and North Sámi). From 2024 to 2025, he held a postdoctoral position at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CNRS, Lyon) before joining the University of Paris 8.

 

His research combines qualitative and quantitative approaches — including frequentist and Bayesian statistical modelling, network science, and natural language processing — and is grounded in fieldwork conducted in France, Vanuatu, and Arctic Norway. His work has been recognised with the Mouton d’Or Prize 2023 (DeGruyter Mouton, best article of the year), the Best Paper in Cognitive Linguistics Prize (Zagreb, 2016), and the 1st Prize at the John Benjamin’s Young Researcher Award (Pavia, 2015). He has served on the Executive Committee of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) since 2017.

 

Research interests : cognitive semantics, morphosyntax, multimodal and polysemiotic communication, metaphor, iconicity, language variation and change, indigenous languages, sociolinguistics, natural language processing.

Books and archives

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • Hoemann, K., Lee, Y., Dussault, E., Devylder, S., Ungar, L.H., Geeraerts, D. & Gomes de Mesquita, B. (accepted, 2025). The construction of emotional meaning in language. Nature Communications in Psychology.
  • Devylder, S., Hinnel, J., van de Weijer, J., Brink Andersen, L., Laporte-Devylder, L. & H.K. Tomaki Kulukul. 2024. Kin cognition and communication. Cognitive Science 48.9 : e13484.
  • Zlatev, J., Devylder, S., Defina, R., Moskaluk, K. & Andersen, L.B. 2023. Analyzing polysemiosis. Semiotica (253), 81–116.
  • Devylder, S. 2022. The Archipelago of Meaning. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 33, 2.
  • Devylder, S. 2022. Making metaphor studies less WEIRD. Lexis. Journal in English Lexicology (20).
  • Zlatev, J., Blomberg, J., Devylder, S., Naidu, V. & J. van de Weijer. 2021. Motion event descriptions in Swedish, French, Thai and Telugu. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53:1, 58–90.
  • Devylder, S., Bracks, C., Shimotori, M. & Siahaan, P. 2020. Carving the body at its joints. Language and Cognition 12, 4.
  • Devylder, S. & Zlatev, J. 2020. Cutting and Breaking Metaphors of the Self and the Motivation and Sedimentation Model. In Baicchi, A. (ed.), Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
  • Devylder, S. 2019. Mereology in the Flesh. In Bolognesi, M., Brdar, M. & Despot, K. (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
  • Devylder, S. 2018. Diagrammatic iconicity explains asymmetries in Paamese possessive constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 29, 2.
  • Naidu, V., Zlatev, J., Duggirala, V., van de Weijer, J., Devylder, S. & Blomberg, J. 2018. Holistic Spatial Semantics and post-Talmian Motion Event Typology. Cognitive Semiotics.
  • Devylder, S. 2017. Cutting and Breaking the Embodied Self. CogniTextes 16, 1.

Book chapter and review

  • Devylder, S. & Zlatev, J. 2020. Cutting and Breaking Metaphors of the Self. In Baicchi, A. (ed.), Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.
  • Devylder, S. 2019. [Review of] Dancygier, B. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. English Text Construction 12(1), 143–153.

Email : simon.devylder[at]univ-paris8.fr