I am a linguist with a PhD from the Program in Applied Linguistics at Boston University. Broadly, my main areas of interest in linguistics are discourse, pragmatics, semantics, and phonetics. I am very interested in both corpus linguistic methods and applications of computational linguistics to theoretical linguistic study.

I did my MA and PhD coursework at Boston University, MIT, and Brandeis University. I was a founding member of the group Computational Linguistics at Boston University.

Some topics I am working on or have worked on:

• describing word meaning by profiling words in corpora
• syntagmatic word relations such as collocation and colligation
• paradigmatic word relations such as synonymy, antonymy and polysemy
• identifying the meanings of a word by analyzing translations in a parallel corpus
• evaluating the semantic prosody of discourse entities by looking at collocation in a corpus
• evidentiality and the way sources are quoted in political news reporting
• citation practices in academic writing
• optimal ways of designing software for use by linguists
• ways of combining automated and manual methods in discourse analysis

I spend a lot of time designing software for linguists to use. For an overview, see Programming.

I also am fairly active in corpus complilation. I have been involved in the creation of linguistic corpora of various types of language:

• Early Modern English witness depositions
• On-line collaborative learning activities
• university student essays
• discipline-specific articles in political science, perinatology, etc.
• political reporting in newspapers
• possessive noun phrases

Here you can download my Curriculum Vitae.

The langauges I work with most are English, Spanish, and Swedish, but I also speak Portuguese, German, and French. I have managed to learn and then forget a fair amount of Japanese.

To come: download of my PhD thesis