Research

Research interests


Research activity

My research is rooted in quantitative variationist linguistics.

Much of my research focuses on language complexity, its variation and its relationship to extra-linguistic pressures.  Thus, I work at the interface of information-theory, sociolinguistics, cross-language typology, language evolution,  second language acquisition research, and historical linguistics. 

I am also interested in digital language use and grammatical variation in emerging registers of computer-mediated communication. Recent projects explore, for instance, subjectivity, opinion and evaluation in computer-mediated communication. This strand of research unites quantitative methods with discourse analytic and text linguistic approaches. 


Current projects

Complexity, causality, change: Testing extra-linguistic triggers as causal mechanisms (CoCa)

(funded by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung, Stuttgart, Germany)

Extra-linguistic triggers of Morphosyntactic Variation in Englishes (MoVE)

(funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Cologne, Germany)

Past projects

Language complexity meets discourse analysis: exploring the interplay of complexity and subjectivity

Are online comments like conversations? Defining a new register

(funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn/Berlin, Germany)

PhD project

An information-theoretic approach to language complexity: variation in naturalistic corpora

(funded by the Cusanuswerk, Bonn, Germany)