• variationist & probabilistic linguistics
• dialectology and dialectometry
• varieties of English world-wide
• historical linguistics, in particular: syntactic change
• language/dialect typology

My research interests ultimately all boil down to variationist (socio)linguistics. I view linguistic variation as a window into the hidden structure of human language and the nature of linguistic knowledge. My PhD dissertation project was concerned with a primarily psycholinguistic phenomenon (persistence, a.k.a. priming) and its relevance for describing and understanding variation in interactional discourse. My current research interests lie with (i) large-scale dialectological and geolinguistic patterns of variation, (ii) the interface between linguistic typology and variation studies (key terms: analyticity, syntheticity, and linguistic complexity), and (iii) the probabilistic modeling of (morpho)syntactic variation (in synchrony and diachrony). I usually work quantitatively on the empirical basis of naturalistic corpus data, although I am open-minded about qualitative approaches and other data sources (e.g. survey material).

Current projects:

• 2008-2013
  Corpus approaches to geolinguistic and genetic patterns of aggregate morphosyntactic variation in varieties of English
  Funded by the FRIAS (RAs: Christoph Wolk & Katharina Ehret)
  details

• 2009-2013, with Joan Bresnan (Stanford University)
  Predicting syntax in space and time
  Funded by the FRIAS (RA: Christoph Wolk), in conjunction with NSF grant BCS-1025602 ("The development of syntactic alternations", PI: Joan Bresnan)
  details

• with Lars Hinrichs, UT Austin
  Prescriptivism in Present-Day American English

• with Marianne Hundt, University of Zurich
  Grammatical variation in Early New Zealand English

• with Anette Rosenbach, Tanagra Wines
  Genitive and dative variability in Late Modern English

• with Tom Ruette, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  A bottom-up approach to multilectal variation in the lexicon of written Standard English

• with Jeff Siegel, University of New England
  Measuring analyticity and syntheticity in creoles

• with Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University
  Aggregating dialectology and typology
   

The Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects Sampler (FRED-S) is a 1-million word corpus sampling a subset of those texts in the 2.5-million word Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED) that are not subject to copyright restrictions. FRED-S is  publicly accessible (please contact me if you're interested). Read up about FRED-S here and here.

We are also currently creating a POS-tagged version of FRED-S; an online interface to access this corpus is available at www.meertens.nl/edisyn/searchengine.