Stefan Th. Gries - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Stefan Th. Gries is (Full) Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

at the University of California, Santa Barbara

University of California, Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

(UCSB) and Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.

Career

Gries earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1998 and 2000. He was at the Department of Business Communication and Information Science of the University of Southern Denmark

University of Southern Denmark

The University of Southern Denmark, with campuses located in the southwestern part of Denmark - i.e. Funen, Southern Jutland and Sealand - is a research and educational institution with deep regional roots and an international outlook. Reaching even further south, the university offers a number of...

at Sønderborg (1998-2005), first as a lecturer, then as Assistant Professor and tenured Associate Professor; during that time, he also taught part-time at the University of Hamburg

University of Hamburg

The University of Hamburg is a university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by Wilhelm Stern and others. It grew out of the previous Allgemeines Vorlesungswesen and the Kolonialinstitut as well as the Akademisches Gymnasium. There are around 38,000 students as of the start of...

. In 2005, he spent 10 months as a visiting scholar in the Psychology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network....

in Leipzig, Germany, before he accepted a position at UCSB

University of California, Santa Barbara

, starting November 1, 2005. Gries was a Visiting Professor at the 2007 and the 2011 LSA

Linguistic Society of America

The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...

Linguistic Institutes at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

and the University of Colorado at Boulder

University of Colorado at Boulder

The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...

and will be a Visiting Professor at the 2013 LSA

Linguistic Society of America

Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

, Ann Arbor.

Research

Methodologically, Gries is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...

, cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms...

, and computational linguistics

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

, who uses a variety of different statistical methods to investigate linguistic topics such as morpho-phonology (the formation of morphological blend

Blend

In linguistics, a blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes.-Linguistics:...

s), syntax (syntactic alternations), the syntax-lexis interface (collostructional analysis

Collostructional analysis

Collostructional analysis is a family of methods developed by Stefan Th. Gries and...

), and semantics (polysemy

Polysemy

Polysemy is the capacity for a sign or signs to have multiple meanings , i.e., a large semantic field.Charles Fillmore and Beryl Atkins’ definition stipulates three elements: the various senses of a polysemous word have a central origin, the links between these senses form a network, and ...

, antonymy, and near synonymy in English and Russian) and corpus-linguistic methodology (corpus homogeneity and comparisons, dispersion measures, n-gram identification and exploration, and other quantitative methods), as well as first and second language acquisition. Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods (acceptability judgments, sentence completion, priming, self-paced reading times, and sorting tasks). Much of his recent work involves the open source software R.

Theoretically, he is a cognitively-oriented linguist (with an interest in Construction Grammar

Construction grammar

The term construction grammar covers a family of theories, or models, of grammar that are based on the idea that the primary unit of grammar is the grammatical construction rather than the atomic syntactic unit and the rule that combines atomic units, and that the grammar of a language is made up...

) in the wider sense of seeking explanations in terms of cognitive processes without being a cognitive linguist in the narrower sense of following any one particular cognitive-linguistic theory. The researchers who have influenced his work most are (in alphabetical order) R. Harald Baayen, Douglas Biber, Nick C. Ellis, Adele E. Goldberg, and Michael Tomasello.

Publications

Gries has authored three books - one research monograph, an introduction to statistics with R for linguists, and a book on corpus linguistics with R. He has also co-edited four volumes - two on corpora in cognitive linguistics, one on corpus linguistics, and one on cognitive linguistics. He has (co-)authored articles in the leading peer-reviewed journals of his fields (Cognitive Linguistics and International Journal of Corpus Linguistics) as well as in many other peer-reviewed journals. He is founding editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, associate editor of Cognitive Linguistics, and performs editorial functions for the international peer-reviewed journals Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics, CogniTextes, Constructions and Frames, Corpora, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, Journal of Advanced Linguistic Studies, and Language and Cognition as well as for John Benjamins's book series 'Cognitive Linguistics and Practice'.

External links

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