Current Research



You can also visit my site on Academia.edu.

I have constructed a fully POS-tagged and parsed corpus of part of the Septembertestament, Luther's first translation of the New Testament into Early New High German, written in 1522. The current version of this corpus consists of over 100,000 words of parsed text, including the full books of Matthew, Mark, John, and Acts. I am interested in extending this corpus, particularly to include other texts from Early New High German (and perhaps other time periods), but for the time being have no concrete plans.

The annotation guidelines for the Parsed Corpus of ENHG are outlined in this wiki. I am willing to share the alpha version of the corpus by request, and have semi-long-term plans to make the corpus available for public use.

I have also parsed some sections of the Tyndale New Testament translation (Early Modern English, published 1534), building on the existing sample in the PPCEME corpus, to create a parallel sample to the Septembertestament corpus.

I recently completed my PhD thesis, titled The syntax and pragmatics of fronting in Germanic.

Other papers I have recently worked on:

The pragmatics of direct object fronting in Historical English (with Jon Stevens) -- in the proceedings for the 36th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC 36), published in PWPL 19.1.

The information structure of subject extraposition in Early New High German -- versions of this paper were presented at the 35th annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC) and in the Information Structure in Formal Grammar satellite workshop (IFG) at the HPSG 2011 conference. Linked is the paper as it appears in the proceedings of HPSG 2011 (a version also appears in PWPL 18.1, the proceedings of PLC 35).

On the use of passives across Germanic (with Joel Wallenberg) - paper presented at DiGS 13, 2011. Slides from the presentation are linked.

Analyzing V2 triggers in Historical English (with Aaron Ecay) - paper presented at DiGS 13, 2011. Slides from the presentation are linked.

The origins of expletive there in West Germanic - paper presented at DiGS 12, 2010. Linked is a draft of the paper to be published in the proceedings of DiGS 12.

Subject relatives and expletives in Early New High German - paper presented at BLS 36, 2010. Linked is a draft of the paper to be published in the proceedings of BLS 36.

The loss of Quantifier Movement and OV in English: An illusory connection (with Joel Wallenberg) - paper presented at DiGS 10, 2009.