Welcome...
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