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.

Affiliations and honorary titles

• Affiliated faculty, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Visiting Leibniz Professor, Research Academy Leipzig, University of Leipzig
• Honorary Liebig Professor of the Justus Liebig University Giessen
• Visiting Chair, ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science

Organizations

• Cognitive Science Ph.D. emphasis
• Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Ph.D. emphasis
• SCUL (Studying the Cognitive Underpinnings of Language)
• Cognition and Language Workshop (CLaW)