Natalia Levshina

Empirical approaches to constructions
and semantics

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About myself

I'm a brand-new fresh-out-of-the-oven PhD in linguistics. A few months ago I defended my dissertation at the University of Leuven, Belgium (see the slides). From April, I'm teaching and doing research at the English Department of the University of Jena, Germany. 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.

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