I do corpus analyses and experimental studies to investigate how children's comprehension and productive use of specific (complex) linguistic structures is guided by the form and function of these and related structures in their input. I see language acquisition as a general learning process and ...

Although grounded in areal typology this project looks at the relation of frequency of occurrence and areal distribution of (phonetic) features, specifically in the languages of the Caucasus. On the one hand, the project aims to explain the motivation for sound change within a defined geographical ...

The project I am working on aims at a description as well as an explanation of constituent order in coordinate constructions in spoken English on several levels, ranging from morphology to the phrasal level. Crucially, frequency features high among the variables influencing this linearization ...

I defended my thesis entitled "Pronominal subjects in Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese: semantics, pragmatics, and formulaic sequences" in November 2012. I am very grateful to the Graduiertenkolleg 1624 "Frequency effects" for having me as their guest in 2011.

The introduction ...

My general research interest is in language change and its underlying mechanisms, with a particular focus on fitting insights from cognitive linguistics to the facts of language change and vice versa. The study of idiolectal variation can help further this goal, as it can be hypothesized that the ...

I am a philosophically inclined quantitative corpus linguist working from the perspective of a usage-based cognitive construction grammar (quite a mouthful). My current research is motivated by questions about why grammars are the way they are, why language users tend to exhibit processing ...