Stefan Th. Gries


Stefan Th. Gries is professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. He was a Visiting Chair of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University and was the Leibniz Professor at the Research Academy Leipzig of the Leipzig University.,

Career

Gries 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, first as a lecturer, then as assistant professor and tenured associate professor; during that time, he also taught English linguistics part-time at the Department of British and American Studies of the University of Hamburg. 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 was a visiting professor at the 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2019 LSA Linguistic Institutes at Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Davis.

Research

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, syntax, the syntax-lexis interface, and semantics and corpus-linguistic methodology, as well as first and second/foreign language acquisition. Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods. Much of his recent work involves the open source software R.
Theoretically, he is a cognitively oriented usage-based linguist in the wider sense of seeking explanations in terms of cognitive processes without being a cognitive linguist in the narrower sense of following any one particular cognitive-linguistic theory. The researchers who have influenced his work most are R. Harald Baayen, Douglas Biber, Nick C. Ellis, Adele E. Goldberg, and Michael Tomasello.

Publications

Books written by Gries

Gries has co-edited a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics. He has as well as in other peer-reviewed journals. He was the co-founder, co-editor-in-chief, then editor-in-chief of the international peer-reviewed journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science, and associate co-editor of Cognitive Linguistic Studies, and performs editorial functions for the international peer-reviewed journals Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Semantics, CogniTextes, Constructions, Constructions and Frames, Corpora, Corpus Linguistics Research, Corpus Pragmatics, Glottotheory, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, Journal of Language Modelling, Language and Cognition, and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism as well as for the book series 'Cognitive Linguistics and Practice', 'Corpora and Language in Use', and 'Explorations in English Language and Linguistics'.