Natalia Levshina
Empirical approaches to constructions
and semantics
About myself
I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Marburg (Research Centre 'Deutscher Sprachatlas'). My current projects involve quantitative language comparison with the help of parallel corpora. I'm also working in a large-scale interdisciplinary LOEWE project Exploring Fundamental Linguistic Categories. My interests lie in the usage-based empirical quantitative approaches to grammar and semantics in different languages. I also have academic/industrial experience in pragmatics (a Candidate's degree from St. Petersburg University) and Machine Translation.
Dreaming of a truly usage-based grammar and semantics...
My main ambition is modeling constructions and their semantics with the help of empirical data. How to bridge the gap between concepts and counts? Here are some of my quantitative models which, I believe, are steps in this direction:
Constructive
Competition
What can the speaker know about the use
of near-synonymous constructions?
From
Lexical Fields into
Constructional Spaces
or What
happens if a grammarian gets
inspired by the structuralist lexicology
and also happens to know some
statistics
3D-Grammar
Integration of the
formal, conceptual and social
dimensions of constructional variation
in a recontextualized model of
language
Causatives
of
the world, unite!
First steps towards
a usage-based contrastive causology
Note: This approach is interdisciplinary, so the Glossary of some of the terms used here may be useful.