Prof. Silvia Adler

As Full Professor in the Department of French Culture at Bar Ilan University I specialize in both French linguistics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis. I was initially interested in ellipsis, thrifty language, and simple and complex prepositions, to which I devoted a book (Ellipse et Régimes des Prépositions Françaises. Louvain – Paris: Peeters Publishers, BIG, 2012), as well as a large-scale research that resulted in numerous articles. My interest in prepositions also led to an extensive research on intensity and scalarity, as well as on approximation and precision. In recent years, I have been conducting a large-scale research on French general unspecified nouns which led to a series of papers dealing each with a different aspect of the question, and culminating in the co-edition of a thematic issue at one of the most highly valued French linguistic journals Langue Française (2018). I have been examining questions related to cohesion, reference, taxonomy, general nouns' capacity to refer to media events or to create media events, their exploitation in a big data corpus, and so forth (Adler, 2014-2018). In recent years I also began exploring paratactic syntax. I was tempted by the idea of exploring potential areas of overlap between ellipsis and microsyntax and to examine thrifty language from a much broader perspective, beyond the scope of the prepositional phrase. To that end, I began studying reduced hypothetic constructions and later on syndetic and asyndetic parataxis in advertising slogans. As much as these research areas, another facet of my work in the past few years – comics, graphic novels and other multimodal texts – is motivated by strategies of meaning construction. Comics and graphic novels' multimodal nature offers an intriguing platform for the study of rhetoric and argumentative devices, and for the exploration of ellipsis, silence, and implicatures – all being forms of thrifty language.

I have more than thirty years of teaching experience at Tel-Aviv University (in the department of French Language and Literature), Haifa University (the department of French language and literature; the department of Hebrew language; The department of English language and literature), Sapir Academic college (Communication School, the rhetoric division) and Bar-Ilan University.

I chaired the department of French Culture (faculty of Humanities, Bar-Ilan University, 2014-2016) and the program for Gender Studies (the interdisciplinary studies unit, Bar-Ilan University, 2017-2018).

Member of the ILASH Council (IAAL - Israel Association for Applied Linguistics)

In 2019, I was awarded Chevalier dans l'ordre des palmes académiques.

For my publications, visit my homepages:

https://biu.academia.edu/SilviaAdler

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvia_Adler