I was trained as a generative syntactician and will never not love X-bar tree diagrams, but over the years I’ve moved towards looking 
more at the relationship between syntactic patterns and the surrounding discourse, including genre conventions. My research on the passive construction (my favorite linguistic construction!) has led to a deeper engagement with linguistic prescriptivism. In 2025, I was named a research fellow at UW-Madison’s new Center for the Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty. As AI is democratizing linguistic performance, the role of people whose linguistic knowledge and judgment we trust is receding. What does this mean for the public discourse between experts and laypersons — in linguistics, but also beyond? What happens to linguistic theory when the data on which it relies — authentic human utterances — becomes increasingly intermingled with synthetically produced text, text that is known to have been produced with algorithmic bias towards the regular, the formulaic, the stereotypical?
Learn more about other book projects that I have (co-)authored or (co-)edited below.
Discourse Syntax
Discourse Syntax: English Grammar Beyond the Sentence, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. This textbook, co-authored with Heidrun Dorgeloh, takes intermediate and advanced students of linguistics ‘beyond the sentence’ to study grammatical phenomena like word order variation (topicalization, inversion, particle shift, passive voice etc.), connectives, ellipsis, and syntactic complexity. It introduces core concepts of discourse syntax, integrating insights from corpus-based research, and invites the reader to reflect on research design decisions. Each chapter begins with a definition of learning outcomes, provides results from empirical articles, and enables readers to critically assess data visualizations. The beautiful cover was designed by Difei (Lynn) Zhang.
Praise for Discourse Syntax:
“an excellent resource for developing skills and understanding in providing discursive interpretations of syntactic configurations” (Pablo M. Tagarro, Folia Linguistica)
“We need more books like this to help students make the jump to independent research.” (James Donaldson, English Language and Linguistics)
“a unique follow-up on introductions to grammar. Both authors are experts in the field and their enthusiasm for the subject comes through clearly. ” (Elly van Gelderen)
“reader-friendly and highly practical” (Zihen Zhou, Discourse Studies)
Syntactic Variation and Genre
Together with my longterm collaborator Heidrun Dorgeloh, I co-edited a volume on Syntactic Variation and Genre (2010), which exemplifies the shift in my research interests from the relationship between syntax and lexicon to the relationship between syntax and genre. Heidrun Dorgeloh and I also published a chapter on Syntax and Genre in the Oxford Handbook on English Grammar (2020). As part of this shift to more applied topics, I collaborated with Trini Stickle on the grammar of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, resulting in an article on “Transitivity patterns exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation” in Applied Linguistics (2017/2019) and in a chapter in a collection on how to have conversations with individuals diagnosed with dementia geared towards practitioners.
The Passive Construction
My second monograph, Deconstructing the English Passive (DeGrutyer Mouton 2009, reviewed in Language 88 (2012)) provides an account of the form and the function of the English passive centered on lexical saturation of the external argument (implicit argument). In the course of writing this book I also paid attention to what style manuals have to say about the passive. In a corpus based-case study I showed that stylistic advice to avoid the passive (because it is presumed to be ‘weak’ and ‘wordy’) may actually result in constructions that include no human agent whatsoever (It was shown…vs. The data show...). My interest in the passive and the public perception of the passive have led me to my current book project, Bad Grammar in the Digital Age (under contract with Routledge Publishing), which will address the role of prescriptivism in language use. A chapter from the book, co-authored with Lynn Zhang, appeared in 2024 (review here).
Theoretical Syntax and Semantics of English Verbs
My first monograph, Verbklassifizierung und aspektuelle Alternationen im Englischen (Niemeyer 2001), was based on my dissertation and looked at the relationship between verb meaning and grammatical behavior in English. Why is it that a transitive verb like cut allows the intransitive-looking middle construction (This bread cuts easily) but not the superficially intransitive ergative construction (*The bread cut)? I developed a hierarchical account of linking rules in the Optimality Theory framework. I also co-edited a theory-focused collection on Structural Aspects of Semantically Complex Verbs (2002, with Nicole Dehé).
