Visiting Scholars

Yara Toledo

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP)

Yara Toledo, a Ph.D. student and holder of a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), bridges the worlds of art and information in her academic journey. This dynamic voyage began with the exploration of art and photography discourse. Yara's master's research involved an analysis of how art critics, enthusiasts, and scholars articulated their thoughts on the renowned North American photographer Sally Mann. Through this endeavor, she unearthed thematic dimensions in Mann's work, unraveling the intricate layers that constitute the essence of her artistry. 

Currently, Yara has shifted her focus to the pressing realm of infodemic discourse on social media. In this era of rampant information sharing, her work delves into the intricacies of language and communication in the digital landscape. Yara aspires to raise awareness among social media users, equipping them with the tools and insights needed to combat misinformation that has proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic and still affects us. 

Looking ahead, Yara envisions an exciting path forward. Her academic interests will expand to encompass the captivating realm of contemporary art discourse. She intends to employ Corpus Linguistics to study the language that surrounds different artistic expressions. In doing so, Yara aims to illuminate contemporary art's historical, societal, and market significance, providing valuable insights for scholars and art enthusiasts alike. Moreover, she wants to continue her exploration of social media and infodemic discourse, recognizing their undeniable impact on society and their potential to shape the narratives of our times. 

Gaëtanelle Gilquin

UCLouvain, Belgium

Gaëtanelle is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at UCLouvain, Belgium, and co-director of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics. She is visiting NAU through the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program. Her research interests include learner corpus research, cognitive linguistics and the study of writing processes. 

Maria Claudia Nunes Delfino

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil

Claudia is at NAU for the Fall of 2019. She is doing part of the research for her PhD in the corpus lab under the supervision of Jesse Egbert. She works with a corpus of song lyrics in English. Her goal is to identify the text typology of the lyrics, according to their linguistic characteristics and to the vocabulary used by the composers. Being at NAU has allowed her to improve her corpus design and to learn more about Corpus Linguistics, Statistics and Formulaic Language.

Ana Eliza Pereira Bocorny

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil

Dr. Bocorny is a Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. Her research interests lie in Applied Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes and Corpus Linguistics. As a Visiting Scholar at NAU’s Department of English, under the supervision of Randi Reppen, she is working with the study of formulaic language in research articles across disciplines. In Brazil, she is developing “LÚMINA idiomas”, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that provides open access online resources and tools for Academic Literacy 

Tove Larsson

Uppsala University (Sweden), Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain (Belgium) 

Dr. Larsson received her Ph.D. from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2016. Her research interests include analysis and applications of learner corpora, L2 writing, register variation, lexico-grammar and linguistic complexity. She is also interested in research methodology.  She is spending the fall term at NAU as part of her postdoc (funded by the Swedish Research Council).  She is working with Randi Reppen, Luke Plonsky and Jesse Egbert in several projects while she is here at NAU.

Dick Kaisheng Huang

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China

Dr. Huang is a professor at School of Foreign Studies, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, China. He has received his Ph.D from Center for Applied English Studies, the University of Hong Kong, supervised by Professor Ken Hyland in the field of corpus-based phraseological research. His recent papers appear in System and English for Specific Purposes. He is currently visiting the Corpus Research Lab of Northern Arizona University, working with Douglas Biber on lexical bundles performed by L1 and L2 learners, which aims to analyze how native and overseas Chinese English learners make use of lexical bundles. 

Veronika Laippala

University of Turku, Finland

Veronika visited NAU during 2018-2019. Her research interests include online registers in different languages, the application of machine learning and NLP to study texts and web-as-corpus reseach.

Maria Carolina Zuppardi 

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil 

Carolina spent the 2018-2019 academic year working on her PhD research in the corpus lab under a Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. She was supervised by Jesse Egbert and her dissertation study analyses dimensional collocational relations and extended collocational networks in written academic English. Her research interests include formulaic language, language variation, and English for Academic/Specific Purposes.  

Tanara Zingano Kuhn

Centre for General and Applied Linguistics Studies (CELGA-ILTEC) of University of Coimbra, Portugal

Dr. Kuhn is a Research Fellow at the Centre for General and Applied Linguistics (CELGA-ILTEC), University of Coimbra, with participation in projects led by the International Institute for the Portuguese Language (IILP).  She is interested in the area of Applied Linguistics, with emphasis on Lexicography, Corpus Linguistics and Teaching Portuguese as an Additional Language. Under the supervision of Douglas Biber, she investigated the use of lexical bundles in the Corpus de Português Escrito em Periódicos (Corpus of Portuguese from Academic Journals) - CoPEP (Kuhn & Ferreira, 2018), which comprises texts from Brazilian and Portuguese academic journals from six different areas of knowledge.

Deise P. Dutra

Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil

Visiting scholar for the Fall of 2018. Dr. Dutra was under the supervision of  Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen. Her research interests include learner and specialized corpora, mainly on register variation, linguistic complexity and implications for academic writing instruction.  

Danilo Duarte Costa

Federal University of Mineas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil

Danilo carried out one semester of his PhD at NAU. He was under the supervision of Randi Reppen. His dissertation study uses corpus tools to investigate the language of textbooks in the disciplines of chemistry and physics.  

Carlos Henrique Kauffmann

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil

Carlos spent the Fall of 2017 at NAU being supervised by Jesse Egbert, as part of his PhD research on style variation across Brazilian 19th century novels and short stories. His main research interests include stylistic and register variation analyses across press registers and literature prose.

Cristina Mayer Acunzo

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil

During the period she stayed at NAU as a visiting scholar, she took two courses taught by Jesse Egbert: Grammatical Foundations (ENG 528) and Advanced Statistics for Applied Linguistics (ENG 698). Jesse was the co-supervisor of her PhD research on Corpus Linguistics, specifically Multidimensional Analysis and the language of the Internet: What and how we write on the web. She had the chance to improve her PhD research under Jesse’s supervision, as he suggested the canonical statistics analysis during a qualifying examination in which he participated. Together they carried out the canonical analysis with the Functional and Lexical Multidimensional Analyses in the research, which was essential for its results. 

Simone Vieira Resende

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil

Simone Resende was awarded a scholarship from the CAPES Foundation, an agency under the Ministry of Education of Brazil, in order to conduct part of her doctoral research as a visiting student in the corpus lab at NAU. She was supervised by Douglas Biber and her dissertation study analyses dimensions of translation variation across texts translated by student and experienced translators. Her research interests include Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Register Studies and Language Variation.

Pierfranca Forchini, PhD 

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy

Dr. Forchini was a visiting scholar at NAU in 2008. She worked on the linguistic nature of American movie conversation. More specifically, she applied Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis (1998) to compare move dialogues (i.e. authentic movie transcriptions, and not web scripts)  to face-to-face conversation (i.e. transcriptions from the Longman Spoken American Corpus). Thanks to the expertise and generosity of Douglas Biber she was able to improve her corpus design, access the Corpus Lab and, especially, have illuminating talks with him. Furthermore, by applying his methodology, she could demonstrate that movies can be legitimately used to study and teach spoken language features due to the high level of linguistic similarity they share with face-to-face conversation. 

Magali Paquot

Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

While she was at NAU, Magali Paquot worked in collaboration with Doug Biber on a Multi-Dimensional Analysis to compare foreign learner language across registers (argumentative essays vs. term papers) (Paquot & Biber, 2015). She also started collaborative work with Luke Plonsky on quantitative research methods and study quality in learner corpus research; this study was published in the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research in 2017.

Tony Berber Sardinha

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil

Dr. Berber Sardinha worked with Douglas Biber while at NAU in 2004/2005. He was looking at how to retrieve metaphors from corpora using corpus techniques. He hand-coded corpora for metaphor and then used the lexical patterns around the metaphorically-used words in the annotated corpora as cues for identifying metaphors in new non-annotated corpora.