About me

Hi! I’m a Horizon postdoctoral fellow at the Psycholinguistics & Cognition lab at Concordia University, Montreal. In my work, I combine experimental and corpus-based methods to investigate linguistic representation and processing.

From Fall 2024, I will do a two-year postdoc at the University of Toronto, working with Dr. Blair C. Armstrong.

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

—– 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 contemporary language and 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