Stefan Th. Gries

Stefan Th. Gries (born 1970) is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

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 at Sønderborg (1998-2005), first as a lecturer, then as Assistant Professor and tenured Associate Professor. In 2005, he spent 10 months as a visiting scholar in the Psychology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, before he accepted a position at UCSB, starting November 1, 2005. From 1998 until 2005, he also taught part-time at the University of Hamburg and he was a Visiting Professor at the 2007 LSA Linguistic Institute at Stanford University.

Research

Methodologically, Gries is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, who uses a variety of different statistical methods to investigate linguistic topics such as morphophonology (the formation of morphological blends), syntax (syntactic alternations), the syntax-lexis interface (collostructional analysis), and semantics (polysemy and near synonymy in English and Russian) and corpus-linguistic methodology (corpus homogeneity and comparisons, dispersion measures, and other quantitative methods); more recently, he has begun to work in the areas of first and second language acquisition. Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods (sentence completion, priming, self-paced reading times, and sorting tasks). Much of his recent work involves the open source software R (programming language). Theoretically, he is a cognitively-oriented linguist (with an interest in Construction Grammar) in the wider sense of seeking explanations in terms of cognitive processes without being a cognitive linguist in the narrower sense of following, e.g., Ronald W. Langacker's Cognitive Grammar. The researchers who have influenced his work most are (in alphabetical order) [http://www.ualberta.ca/~hbaayen/ R. Harald Baayen] , [http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~biber/ Douglas Biber] , [http://www.princeton.edu/~adele Adele E. Goldberg] , and [http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ Michael Tomasello] .

Publications

Gries has published one research monograph as well as an introduction to statistics with R for linguists and articles both in edited volumes and the leading peer-reviewed journals of his field ("Cognitive Linguistics" and "International Journal of Corpus Linguistics") and other peer-reviewed journals ("Linguistics", "Journal of Psycholinguistic Research", "Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory", "Corpora", "Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics", "The Mental Lexicon", "Literary and Linguistic Computing", "Journal of Quantitative Linguistics", "Journal of Child Language", "English World Wide", and others). In 2009, another textbook by Gries - "Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R" - will appear. He is founding co-editor in chief of the international peer-reviewed journal "Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory", associate editor of "Cognitive Linguistics", has co-edited two volumes on corpora in cognitive linguistics, and performs editorial functions for "Constructions and Frames", "Language and Cognition" and "CogniTextes".

External links

* [http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries Homepage at the University of California, Santa Barbara]
*" [http://www.degruyter.com/journals/cllt Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory] "
*" [http://www.degruyter.com/journals/cogling Cognitive Linguistics] "
*" [http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detail.cfm?id=IS-9783110198263-1 Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis] "
*" [http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detail.cfm?id=IS-9783110198270-1 Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy] "