Stefan Th. Gries

Stefan Th. Gries is currently (Full) Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1998 and 2000. He was at the Department of Business Communication and Information Science of the University of Southern Denmark at Sønderborg (1998-2005). In 2005, he spent 10 months as a visiting scholar in the Psychology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, before he accepted a position at UCSB, starting November 1, 2005. Gries is Honorary Liebig-Professor at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Visiting Chair in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University, and was a Visiting Professor at the 2007, 2011, 2013, and 2015 LSA Linguistic Institutes.

Methodologically, Gries is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics, who uses a variety of different statistical methods to investigate linguistic topics such as morphophonology (the formation of morphological blends), syntax (syntactic alternations), the syntax-lexis interface (collostructional analysis), and semantics (polysemy, antonymy, and near synonymy) and corpus-linguistic methodology (corpus homogeneity and comparisons, association and dispersion measures, n-gram identification and exploration, and other quantitative methods), as well as first and second / foreign language acquisition. Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods (acceptability judgments, sentence completion, priming, self-paced reading times, and sorting tasks). Much of his recent work involves the open source software R.

Theoretically, he is a cognitively-oriented usage-based linguist (with an interest in Construction Grammar) in the wider sense of seeking explanations in terms of cognitive processes. The researchers who have influenced his work most are (in alphabetical order) R. Harald Baayen, Douglas Biber, Nick C. Ellis, Adele E. Goldberg, and Michael Tomasello.

A publication particularly relevant for this ESU is the second edition (2016) of his textbook "Quantitative corpus linguistics with R" published by Routledge.