Kristie Denlinger, PhD 

About Me

Howdy! I am a lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at Austin. I obtained my PhD from UT in the Summer of 2023. My dissertation, The Semantics of Past Participles, was advised by Stephen Wechsler. 

***I am on the job market!*** I'm currently open to both academic and industry positions. I'd especially love to contribute my experience in linguistics research to a team working to improve the interpretability, efficiency & safety of LLMs. If it sounds like my experience might be right for your team, I'd love to chat (kdenlinger@utexas.edu)!  

In my research, I adopt a usage-based approach to analyze topics at the syntax-semantics interface, including derivation, argument structure, and telicity. In other words, I study the meaning and structure of natural language by looking for patterns in lots and lots of language data. I am especially interested in how speakers balance the capacity for linguistic innovation while also maintaining implicit grammatical rules. 

I think that it is a particularly exciting time to improve models of language (both formal syntactic/semantic models of natural language and artificial computational language models). There are larger, cleaner, and more typologically diverse language corpora at our disposal than ever before, along with more sophisticated tools to analyze them. I believe that quantitative corpus studies rooted in cognitive science will put us in the best position to understand crucial linguistic phenomena like (semi)-productivity, idiomaticity, compositionality and reference. 

Some research questions I've worked on lately:

✨What happens to the meaning of a verb when it is used as an adjective? What happens to the meaning of a noun when it is used as a verb? 

✨How can we best model the semantic idiosyncrasy associated with derivational processes?

✨How does the predictability of a speaker's message affect the form they choose to express it?

My pronouns are she/her.

When not being a professional word nerd, I like to paint, goof around with comedians, and hike. I have the best dog in the world, Einstein!