Research areas: second-language acquisition of French, syntax-discourse interface, near-nativeness, historical development of French and Romance, language change
My research examines word order variation as it is conditioned by discourse-pragmatic factors, such as the flow and organization of information, and also by sociolinguistic factors, such as language register, speaker gender, age, and level of education. This theme is common to my two principal areas of research: French as a second language and the history and development of French and the Romance languages. Typical of applied linguistics research, these strands of my work also share a substantial empirical element. In my analyses, I frequently privilege authentic spoken data or, in the case of historical data, written representations of the spoken language.
