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I have worked in various areas of theoretical linguistics research, including morphology, syntax, corpus linguistics, and machine translation. My main current interest is frequency-of-use effects in language. The projects I am involved in aim to understand frequency-of-use crosslinguistically (looking at the frequency of basic vocabulary words in 17 languages), in grammar (upcoming talk on causative-noncausative constructions in 9 languages), and in language contact (following the progress of Māori loanwords into New Zealand English). Additionally, I continue work investigating the organisation of spoken grammar and the structuring of information in conversation, particularly with respect to cleft sentences and inferential constructions. My research is funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology (now NZ Ministry of Science & Innovation).

BOOK 2009 Cleft Constructions in Spoken English, Berlin: VDM Verlag.

REFEREED
ARTICLES		 2012 With Gerry Delahunty. "Inferentials: fixed or not?" To appear in Token Volume 1.
2011 With Paul James. "A Diachronic Corpus of New Zealand Newspapers" New Zealand English Journal 25, 1-14.
2011 With Gerry Delahunty. "Inferentials in Spoken English" Pragmatics 21(3), 307-340.
2011 The Science of Numbers: does Language Help or Hinder? (in a special issue in the Honour of Prof. Roy Harris), Language Sciences. 33(4): 562-568.
2011 With Mark Pagel. How do we use language? Shared patterns in the frequency of word-use across seventeen World languages Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 1101-1107. This article is also printed in the book "Culture Evolves", Oxford University Press.
2010 With Solomon Marcus. Syntactic Iconicity: With and Beyond Its Accepted Principles Revue Roumaine de Linguistique. 4: 19-44.
2010 With Steven Miller. Are Clefts Contagious in Conversation? English Language and Linguistics. 13: 127-132.
2009 Formulaic Tendencies of Demonstrative Clefts in Spoken English. In R. Corrigan, E.A. Moravcsik, H. Quali and K.M. Wheatley (eds.) Formulaic Language: Volume 1. Distribution and Historical Change. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 55-76.
2008 Clefting and Extraposition in English, ICAME - International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Journal. 32: 7-33.
2008 Demonstrative Clefts and Double Cleft Constructions in Spoken English, Studia Linguistica. 62(1): 78-118.
2007 Light and heavy reflexive marking: the Middle Domain in Romanian, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics. 5: 239-269.
2005 Reflexive-Middle and Reciprocal-Middle Continua in Romanian, (Refereed) Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, July 13-15, archived at University of Sydney.
2004 Machine Translation of Various Text Genres, Te Reo; the New Zealand Linguistic Society Journal. 46: 67-94.
2001 Romanian Clitics: Siding with the French or the Serbo-Croatian?, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique. 1-4: 91-105.
2001 The Journey of the Four Colour Theorem Through Time, The New Zealand Mathematics Magazine. 38(3): 1-10.
BOOK
REVIEWS		 2011 Review of Jim Miller's book "A Critical Introduction to Syntax" (Continuum) in The Australian Journal of Linguistics. 31(3): 519-530.
2010 Review of David Crystal's book "Just a Phrase I am Going Through: My Life in Language" (Routledge) in The Australian Journal of Linguistics. 30(3): 367-369.
2010 Review of Nicole Dehé and Yordanka Kavalova's book "Parentheticals" (John Benjamins) in Studies in Language. 34(1): 205-211.
2010 Review of Kathleen Ahrens's (ed.) book "Politics, Gender, and Conceptual Metaphors" (Palgrave) for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.
2009 Pondering God and Grammar, review of Dan Everett's "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes - Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle", in Science. 323(23): 463.
2008 Review of Wallace Chafe's "The Importance of Not Being Earnest", for the Linguist List 19.3677, 01 Dec.
2002 A beautiful mind, review of John Casti's "Mathematical Mountaintops", in The New Zealand Listener. 183 (May 18-24).
LETTERS 2010 Linguistics' Aid to Science Education, letter published in Science E-Letters, August 2010.
2005 Languages with soul, letter published in New Scientist, Vol. 185, 5th March, p. 33.
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