Ana Krajinović

Hi! I am Ana and I am creative in linguistics, comics, writing, and mental health!

See my other media appearances here.

LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University, where I research the visual language of comics in Visual Language Lab. In 2020 I completed my PhD in linguistics at Humboldt University of Berlin (MelaTAMP project) and the University of Melbourne (CoEDL) in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. In my research I created fieldwork-based analyses of Nafsan, an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu.

In my linguistic research I try to uncover regularities in grammar and contribute to answering some of the big questions about the nature of language. Which meanings are often expressed together or by the same word in the languages of the world? Why are they expressed in that way? How do linguistic structure, cognition and environment influence the development of the language?

I am currently working on the evolution of multimodal constructions like internet memes and the emergence of abstract and iconic meanings in communication. For more info on my work on memes, click here. Most recently, I am also working on the visual languages used in comics. Click here to download the preprint of my latest paper: Mark the unexpected. Just below you can find a version of this paper written for the general audience.

My recent post for general audience about my current research, click on the image to read it!

Lionel Emil (left), speaker of Nafsan and participant in my research, and me (right) working on Nafsan transcriptions.

COMICS and WRITING

I am also a comic artist and a writer on Medium and Substack. During the pandemic, I got inspired by my LEGO collection and quirks of linguistics, and started combining the two (see comics below). Soon after, I came back to drawn comics in which I often tell autobiographical stories or jokes about mental health. My latest comic is Brave Hearts, which tells the story of my grandma’s journey to come see the newborn me in a time of war. If you want to receive regular news about my comics, you can click here to subscribe to my newsletter! For more info, go to the “Comics” tab.

If you want to repost a comic, please provide a link to my original post, thank you! They are published under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.