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I have worked in various areas of theoretical linguistics, including morphology, syntax, corpus linguistics, and machine translation. My main current interests concern 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 (through typological work on causal/noncausal constructions), 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. [If you would like PDFs of any of my articles which are not available online, please email me.]

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

REFEREED
ARTICLES		 In press With Martin Haspelmath, Michael Spagnol, Heiko Narrog and Elif Bamyaci. Coding causal-noncausal verb alternations: a form-frequency correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics.
In press With Mark Pagel. Frequency of Use and Basic Vocabulary. In Pütz, Martin and Filipović, Luna (eds.) Multilingual Cognition and Language Use: Processing and Typological Perspectives Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
In press With Alexander Onysko. Comparing the usage of Māori loans in spoken and written New Zealand English: A case study of Māori, Pākeha, and Kiwi. In Zenner, Eline and Gitte Kristiansen (eds.). The Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics of Borrowing. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
In press With Esme Winter-Froemel and Alexander Onysko. Why some non-catachrestic borrowings are more successful than others: a case study of English loans in German, In A Koll-Stobbe and S Knospe (eds.). Language Contact in Times of Globalization. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
2013 With Mark Pagel, Andrew Meade and Quentin Atkinson. Ultra-conserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 6 May 2013 Early Edition. See media profile in Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.
2013 With Mark Pagel, Eric Altschuler and Andrew Meade. Linguistic Evidence supports date for Homeric Epics. BioEssays (volume/pages: TBA). See media profile in Scientific American and in History of the Ancient World.
2012 With Gerry Delahunty. Inferentials: fixed or not? Token Volume 1: 59-82.
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).
POPULAR MEDIA 2013 Opinion Piece, published in Waiakto Times Opinion Column, March 2013.
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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