current research focus: Prince Edward Island (Canada)
Language Variation & Change; Variationist Sociolinguistics
focus on variation on a morphosyntactic level
methods of data collection (types of interviews, questionnaires, participant observer, (dis)advantages of the classic "sociolinguistic interview")
methods of presenting data (corpus compilation, tagging, representativeness, social & linguistic variables)
interpreting data (advantages & disadvantages of qualitative & quantitative methods; types of regression analysis in SPSS, GoldVarb, R)
modelling variation & change
linguistically/content-wise - universals of language change; historical, typological & general principles of change; New Dialect Formation; Dynamic Model; inherited change
formally/statistically - (in)applicability of statistic methods, interaction
Varieties of English world-wide
focus on L1 varieties and their influence on / role in the formation of World Englishes (-> transplanted dialects); emerging standards in non-L1 territories
role of traditional dialects and their development/future (traditional and modern dialectology, dialect levelling; urban vs. rural;
reallocation/-interpretation of regional (in)to social variables; social networks, communities of practice; from globalisation to glocalisation
expansion of a "big data" reference corpus consisting of research article abstracts from four academic fields (currently: ca. 100,000 abstracts, 17.6 mio words)
"tagging" of selected features: verbal hedges, epistemic modals, epistemic adverbs
quantification of well-described qualitative differences
hierarchical organisation of variation and interactions; usefulness of predictors in light of explained variance (R2)
delineating (sub)disciplines, topics, timelines -> do "soft sciences" become "harder"? is academic English becoming "more colloquial"?
role of social variables (gender, L1/L2), authorship (single-authored vs. multi-authored papers)