In a nutshell
My research focuses on the way language use interacts with the language system, i.e. on the interaction between discourse relations and syntax, in adult language and in first language acquisition. I am currently developing new research lines on atypical language acquisition and on communication in the public (justice) and medical domain.
Research topics
Discourse & syntax: how do language users highlight new information, convey shared information, contrast pieces of information and adapt the form of their sentences to do so?
Trade-off between syntactic complexity and discourse explicitness
First language acquisition
Language and autism
Corpus Linguistics
Experimental linguistics (first language acquisition)
Specific empirical phenomena (at the syntax-discourse interface):
Anaphoric relations (binding) & scope phenomena
Non-canonical word order (dislocation, topicalisation markers, cleft sentences and specificational sentences in general, postverbal subjects, existential constructions)
Syntactic complexity (embedding)
Discourse markers (discourse explicitness)
Main clause phenomena in French and English
Epistemic modality