I am a linguist, specializing in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and lexicography. My research primarily concentrates on topics in discourse and pragmatics, such as discourse relations (i.e., relations between propositions or speech acts) and discourse signals (e.g., discourse connective if for Condition relations). In my PhD dissertation, I investigated how discourse relations are indicated by a wide variety of signals (such as lexical, semantic, syntactic, and genre features, in addition to discourse connectives). The project also produced a corpus of discourse signals, called the RST Signalling Corpus. In the past, I worked in areas such as sentiment analysis, discourse parsing, and lexicography. More recently, I (and my former colleague, Dr. Markus Egg) investigated the role of continuity or discontinuity (along dimensions like time, space, action, modality, or speech act) in the interpretation discourse relations.

Presently, I and my colleague, Dr. Izabela Czerniak, are investigating the syntactic, semantic, and discourse functions of relative clauses in L2 learners’ corpora of academic texts. A major goal of our inquiry is to examine whether/how the production of English relative clauses is influenced by the L2 learners’ native language background, such as Finnish, Swedish, Italian, or Urdu (and also, systematic typological variation according to language families, if any). Find more information about this project HERE.

Topics of interests

• Discourse analysis: explicit and implicit discourse Relations, signalling in discourse, continuity in discourse, discourse parsing, sentiment analysis
• Corpus linguistics: corpus annotation, corpus development, annotation evaluation
• Lexicography: discourse connective lexicons, bilingual dictionaries, translation of technical terms
• Syntax: Relative clauses, information structuring

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