I was actually interested in language from fairly early on in my schooldays and this interest was even more stimulated when I started my third foreign language, Russian, in school. This language was so different from German, English, and Latin in so many respects, and I found it quite exciting to see how learning to speak Russian allowed me—in fact forced me—to recognize many conceptual distinctions to which the other languages had never alerted me. I was then also fascinated by linguistics in my very first semester at university when I was beginning to learn how different theoretical approaches attempted to come to grips with the distributions and patterning of linguistic elements. This interest in the ways different linguistic elements are used and the functions which such usage events are meant to fulfill is now also at the center of my own research interests.  Much of my work starts out from computationally and/or statistically analyzing large databases of naturally-occurring language to identify formal distributional patterns and how they reflect, or interact with, the meanings and functions that are associated with these patterns. Topicwise, I am currently most interested in the interplay between words and syntactic patterns, the way syntactic structures are acquired by young children, and the creative ways people coin new words; the theoretical framework I feel most closely associated to is that of cognitive/functional linguistics.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

2007. Exploring variability within and between corpora: some methodological considerations. Corpora 1.2:109-51.

2006. Cognitive determinants of subtractive word-formation processes: a corpus-based perspective. Cognitive Linguistics 17.4:535-58.

2005. Syntactic priming: a corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34.4:365-99.

2004. Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on 'alternations'. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9.1:97-129. (with A. Stefanowitsch).

2003. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: a study of Particle Placement. London, New York: Continuum Press.

CURRENT PROJECTS

• The acquisition of tense and aspect in Russian: An association-strength approach (with S. Stoll)
• Finding developmental groups in acquisition data: variance-based neighbor clustering (with S. Stoll)
• A behavioral profile approach to polysemy and synonymy: Phasal verbs in English and Russian (with D.S. Divjak)
• Measures of dispersion for corpus data: an overview, a suggestion, and a research program
• Phonological similarity in multi-word symbolic units

COURSES TAUGHT

• Linguistics 110/210: Computational Linguistics
• Linguistics 120: Corpus Linguistics
• Linguistics 127: Psychology of Language
• Linguistics 137/237: First Language Acquisition
• Linguistics 201: Research Methodology and Statistics in Linguistics
• Linguistics 218: Corpus Linguistics
• Linguistics 252A-B: Seminar in Morphology and Syntax
  - Recent seminar topic: Cognitive Linguistics