research

My research interests lie in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, variational linguistics and dialectology. I am very much interested in the interplay between language variation, culture and cognition. I strongly believe in the use of innovative quantitative techniques and methods from digital humanities to gain insight into language variation.

I currently hold an FWO junior postdoc fellowship on the speed of diachronic lexical change (What makes the clock tick? Concept characteristics and the speed of lexical change). Since February 2020, I have also been involved in the Nephological Semantics project at QLVL, University of Leuven (PI: Dirk Geeraerts, co-supervisors: Dirk Speelman, Stefania Marzo & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi). This project focusses on developing computational tools for automatic meaning detection in large corpora.

Previous positions

Postdoctoral fellow at the VSLX lab (Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto)

From February 2019-January 2020, I worked at the VSLX-lab (Variationist Sociolinguistics) of professor Sali Tagliamonte. We examined language variation and change in the dialects of Ontario.

PhD dissertation

In my PhD dissertation, which was supervised by Dirk Geeraerts (KU Leuven), Dirk Speelman (KU Leuven) and Roeland van Hout (Radboud University Nijmegen), I applied ideas from Cognitive Sociolinguistics to lexical semantics and dialectology.

My PhD research focused on why particular linguistic variables are more prone to variability than others. More specifically, I use statistical analyses of large datasets of dialect data to investigate which factors influence the amount of lexical dialect variation that a concept shows. In my PhD, I showed that both semantic and socio-cultural concept features affect this type of lexical variation.

other projects

In 2018, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Leiden, the Netherlands: MentalLex project, PI: prof. Nicoline van der Sijs) and at KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium: Nephological Semantics project, PI: Dirk Geeraerts, co-supervisors: Dirk Speelman, Stefania Marzo & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi).

In collaboration with Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KU Leuven), Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University) and Jesse Egbert (Brigham Young University ), I investigated probabilistic diachronic variation in the English genitive system. With Eline Zenner and Dirk Speelman, I examined variation in the gender of English loanwords in Dutch.