About me

Hi! I am a psycholinguist who uses experimental and corpus-based methods to investigate linguistic representation and processing. In October 2024, I will start a postdoc at the University of Toronto, working with Dr. Blair C. Armstrong on a project that aims to improve early literacy education for children.

—– NEWS: check out my two new books —–

• Structural priming in the grammatical network (2023), John Benjamins
• Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future (2023), with Stefan Hartmann, Cambridge University Press (Open Access)

—– Current projects —–

• Grammatical creativity: How do speakers comprehend grammatically "coerced" sentences like She sneezed the napkin off the table?
• Argument structure: How do speakers compose meaning in resultatives (She cut the grass short) as opposed to depictives (He cut the grass wet)?
• Implicit arguments: How do speakers infer implicit but unpronounced themes (They were eating [dinner]) and instruments (She was beating the egg [with a whisk])?

—– Other research interests —–

• Construction Grammar and cognitive-linguistic theory: see our Cambridge Element on constructionist approaches (Open Access) and my recent paper on why "constructionhood" is gradient (PDF here)
• Priming as a window into grammatical representation: see my new book on how priming research and cognitive-linguistic theory can inform each other, my paper on priming between the English caused-motion and the resultative construction (author version), and my paper on how priming can be extended to new constructions (author version)
• Language as a network: see my paper about "vertical" and "horizontal" links between constructions (author version) and these slides on how network science methods can be used in linguistics
• Creativity in current and historical language change: see our paper on the concept of "extravagance", its application to "snowclone" constructions like X is the new Y (preprint here), and our paper on extravagant German quantifiers and degree modifiers