Corpus Syntax

I study the grammar of conversational speech, using databases of spoken English made available through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). I explore the use conditions associated with grammatical constructions and intonation patterns—a research area often referred to as discourse pragmatics. My research in discourse pragmatics focuses on the prosodic and grammatical expression of the pragmatic roles topic and focus, and on what grammatical mechanisms people use to do conversational work like expressing an emotional reaction to something, introducing a new topic into the conversation, announcing forthcoming propositional content and assessing what has been said before. This work is a collaborative effort with Knud Lambrecht of University of Texas, Austin and several current and former CU students, including Jason Brenier (on the nonstandard 'copula doubling' pattern in English) and Hartwell Francis (on new topics that are also sentence subjects). For findings of an NSF-sponsored project on conversational reference on which Hartwell and I worked, see the Lexical Subjects site. In recent work with CU doctoral student Jill Duffield, we are exploring explanations for the prevalence of subject relative-clauses in English conversation. We are investigating the claim that the subject relative-clause (as represented by the bracketed portion of cars [that are designed with human beings in mind]) is as common as it is not because of general-purpose interpretive or production constaints but because it is part of an entrenched discourse routine, the presentational relative-clause construction (e.g., There are a lot of people who babysit in their homes).