All kinds of phenomena interest me, but I'm more interested in experimental science than theoretical, and more interested in pure science than applied. Theory is important, but I don't have much patience for drifting away from testability. Applications are important, but it's the big questions that get me excited.

I'm interested in computational modeling of psycholinguistic processes, applying quantitative corpus methods to cognitive linguistics questions, and developing linguistic and computational models of discourse structure. I think Maxent Grammars are a great tool for talking about variation and gradience, with fewer weaknesses than the alternatives. I would also like to bounce around ideas about parallel changes in language and the rest of culture, Chinese abbreviations or clipped compounds (缩写), grammaticalization, and emergence as the resolution of half the arguments philosophers ever had.

Fall quarter I'm on a leave of absence, but will be back doing the usual thing in Winter. Last year I took the introductory Phonetics/Phonology and Syntax/Semantics series, plus a few other courses. At SDSU, I've taken a lot of computational and corpus linguistics classes with Rob Malouf, Eniko Csomay and Mark Gawron. I had a couple psycholinguistics classes with Soonja Choi too. In my undergraduate, I was a physics major at UCSB, doing a linguistics major just for fun.

I'm not teaching now, but before coming to UCSD, I taught EFL full time at Zhejiang Normal University: Oral English for the first and second year students in Chuyang Honors College, and English Writing for second and third years majoring in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.

At San Diego State, I taught Ling 101 (Intro to Language) and served as GA for Ling 420 (Linguistics and English) in Fall 2005. During the 2004–2005 school year I served as GA for the Looking Glass Neighborhood after-school program.