Stefan Th. Gries
Stefan Th. Gries (born 1970) is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (since September 2011), and Visiting Chair (2013–2018) of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University.
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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; during that time, he also taught English linguistics part-time at the Department of British and American Studies of the University of Hamburg. 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. Gries was a visiting professor at the 2007, 2011, 2013, and 2015 LSA Linguistic Institutes at Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Chicago.
Research
Methodologically, Gries is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics, cognitive 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, antonymy, and near synonymy in English and Russian) and corpus-linguistic methodology (corpus homogeneity and comparisons, association and dispersion measures, n-gram identification and exploration, and other quantitative methods), as well as first and second/foreign language acquisition. Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods (acceptability judgments, sentence completion, priming, self-paced reading times, and sorting tasks). Much of his recent work involves the open source software R.
Theoretically, he is a cognitively oriented usage-based 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 any one particular cognitive-linguistic theory. The researchers who have influenced his work most are R. Harald Baayen, Douglas Biber, Nick C. Ellis, Adele E. Goldberg, and Michael Tomasello.
Publications
Gries has authored three books - one research monograph, an introduction to statistics with R for linguists (two editions), and a book on corpus linguistics with R. He has also co-edited six volumes - two on corpora in cognitive linguistics, two on frequency effects in language, one on corpus linguistics, and one on cognitive linguistics - as well as edited one special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics. He has (co-)authored articles in the leading peer-reviewed journals of his fields (Cognitive Linguistics and International Journal of Corpus Linguistics) as well as in many other peer-reviewed journals. He was the co-founder (2005) and then editor-in-chief (2010-2015) of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (of which he now is the General Editor), co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science, and associate co-editor of Cognitive Linguistic Studies, and performs editorial functions for the international peer-reviewed journals Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Semantics, CogniTextes, Constructions, Constructions and Frames, Corpora, Corpus Linguistics Research, Glottotheory, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, Journal of Language Modelling, Language and Cognition, and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism as well as for the book series 'Cognitive Linguistics and Practice' (published by John Benjamins), 'Corpora and Language in Use' (published by Louvain University Press), and 'Explorations in English Language and Linguistics' (published by universities in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina).
External links
- Homepage at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics
- Statistik für Sprachwissenschaftler
- Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R
- Statistics for Linguistics with R
- Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis
- Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy
- Frequency Effects in language learning and processing
- Frequency effects in language representation
- Corpus-linguistic applications: Current studies, new directions
- Cognitive linguistics: convergence and expansion
- Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
- Cognitive Linguistics
