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Research interests

My research program focuses broadly on the relationship between language structure and language use, and particularly the ways in which linguistic forms are motivated by the functions which they serve. Particular areas of focus in my research are the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity, and the study of child language acquisition from a functional perspective

My theoretical influences are somewhat eclectic. I draw liberally from both cognitive and formal approaches to semantic structure in my work on polarity sensitivity. The Scalar Model of Polarity, which is developed in my dissertation and elsewhere, builds on earlier work by Fauconnier and Ladusaw (among others) and seeks a functional motivation for the existence of polarity items in the scalar-argumentative functions these forms serve.

My work on child language consists primarily of the ReVerb project, begun during my postdoc at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The ReVerb Project

ReVerb is a long term, large scale descriptive project which aims to provide a comprehensive account of the development of verbal constructions, including argument structure, auxiliary, and complement constructions in English-speaking children between the ages of (approximately) 1;6 and 5 years. Data for the project comes from seven longitudinal corpora of spontaneous child speech. All seven subjects are first-born children growing up in monolingual American-English speaking families. All seven corpora are publicly available from the CHILDES web site maintained by Brian MacWhinney.

Child
Age Range 
Total Sessions 
Verb Types
Reference
Eve
1;6-2;3
20
223
Brown 1973
Naomi
1;3-3;9
93
264
Sachs 1983
Peter
1;9-3;2
20
286
Bloom 1974
Nina
1;11-3;4
56
325
Suppes 1974
Sarah
2;3-5;1
139
407
Brown 1973
Adam
2;3-5;2
55 
428
Brown 1973
Abe
2;5-5;0 
210 
548 
Kuczaj 1976