I am a philosophically inclined quantitative corpus linguist working from the perspective of a usage-based cognitive construction grammar (quite a mouthful).
My current research is motivated by questions about why grammars are as they are, why language users tend to exhibit processing difficulties with certain structures (and not others), and how the two questions are interrelated.
My approach to these issues is grounded in the premise that linguistic knowledge is by its very nature probabilistic and analogy-based. From this view, I investigate effects of usage-frequency and cognitive entrenchment on shapes of grammars.
A new formalized linguistics will develop out of building complex models that work over noisy, empirical data, whereas, I suspect that a considerable amount of the 'formal' generative linguistics done in recent decades will be seen in retrospect as rather like drawing epicycles.
- Chris Manning @ Cornell Symposium on Language Universals, 2004
Throughout 2012: Together w/ Neal Snider (Nuance Communications), Elma Kerz (RWTH Aachen) and Florian T. Jaeger (U Rochester), I am guest editor for a special issue of Language and Speech on "Parsimony and Redundancy in Usage-Based Models of Linguistic Knowledge". Details on the project can be found here.
July 2012: Talk - "Modeling domain minimization - A multifactorial approach to PP ordering in English" @ the 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, King's College, London, UK.
March 2012: Workshop on "Computational and Quantitative Models of Constructions" @ 5th conference of Formulaic Language Research Network (FLaRN): Talk - "Towards a Constructionist Quantitative Contrastive Analysis: A methodological proposal" slides are now available for download.
March 2012: w/ Elma Kerz5th conference of Formulaic Language Research Network(FLaRN): Talk -"Genre-specific properties of adverbial clauses in English academic writing and newspaper texts" slides are now available for download.
