Research Projects
The Encoding of Motion Events across Languages
From October 2008 to September 2011, the work group English Linguistics will work on a research project on motion verbs. Areas covered will include quantitative corpus-linguistic reassessments of Talmy's and Slobin's seminal work on the encoding of motion events, extensions of their work to caused motion, the development of a reliable annotation scheme for motion events in linguistic corpora, the development of standardized materials for eliciting motion events and collostructional analyses of various aspects of motion verbs and constructions.
Collaborators: Anatol Stefanowitsch (Project Leader), Nina Reshöft.
Funding: Zentrale Forschungsförderung (Universität Bremen).
Quantitative Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Research
We are in the advanced planning stage for a research project on the application of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods to second language corpora. We are currently assembling a corpus of elicited German and Turkish narratives by bilingual speakers of Turkish/German between the ages of 6 and 18 attending various school types, and a matched corpus of German monolingual speakers. The collection of Turkish narratives of monolingual Turkish speakers is currently being planned, as is an extension of the corpus to monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian/German speakers.
Collaborators: Anatol Stefanowitsch (project leader), Sarah Meitzner (collection of German monolingual corpus), Christoph Schroeder (collection of Turkish corpora), Stefanie Haberzettl and Mirja Gruhn (assistance in collecting the German-Turkish corpus). Additional international collaborations are currently under negotiation..
Additional Research Interests
My research interests include cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, bilingualism, metaphor and figurative language, spatial language, and the formation and comprehension of complex words.
