CV

Born 1976; 1996-2002: studied English Philology, Political Science and Economics in Freiburg and Washington D.C.; 2002-2006: Research Assistant, English Department, University of Freiburg; 2005: Doctorate in English Linguistics; 2005-2008: Assistant Professor, English Department, University of Freiburg.

Publications (Selection)

2007 (with Lars Hinrichs). “Recent changes in the function and frequency of standard English genitive constructions: a multivariate analysis of tagged corpora”. English Language and Linguistics 11(3): 335­378.

2007 (with Nils Goldschmidt). “What do economists talk about? A linguistic analysis of published writing in economic journals”. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66(2): 335­378.

2006. Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English. A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

2005. “Language users as creatures of habit: a corpus-linguistic analysis of persistence in spoken English”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1): 113­150.

2003. “BE GOING TO vs. WILL/SHALL: does syntax matter?” Journal of English Linguistics 31(4): 295­323.

FRIAS Research Project

A corpus approach to geolinguistic and genetic patterns in aggregate morphosyntactic variation in varieties of English

Taking advantage of the uniquely extensive pool of naturalistic corpus resources documenting a huge number of geographic varieties of English, the project seeks to marry corpus-linguistic methodologies to dialectometrical and biometric analysis techniques. With a primarily synchronic interest in the ''big picture'' (i.e. aggregate morphosyntactic similarities between dialects and varieties of English), the overarching goal is to deepen our understanding of how, and to what extent, geographical distance and genetic/historical relatedness bear on the representation of linguistic knowledge in authentic linguistic data. Crucially, the investigation will encompass not only geographically neighboring low-contact dialects, but also colonially transplanted, high-contact L1 and L2 varieties of English all around the world. The project will consist of two main studies, one being concerned with dialectometrical analysis (Study 1) and the other one with bioinformatic analysis (Study 2). This line of research will open up venues for interdisciplinary exchange with historians, geographers, biologists, ethnographers, and population geneticists.