Understanding lexical meaning, including evaluative meaning in context and the lexical processing of meaning in the brain, has been the driving impetus behind much of my work in language and cognition. In earlier research, I focused on the construction of a psycholinguistic theory of sense processing using reaction-time studies as well as the construction of a cognitive model to postulate processing differences between conceptual and novel metaphors.

My recent research has focused on corpora-based analyses, with a particular emphasis on examining the lexical choices made and the conceptual metaphors used by politicians with varying ideologies. This area of research contributes to understanding how these linguistic choices reflect a politician’s world conceptualization and their associated strategies to influence others to their points of view.

In addition to these corpora-based analyses, I also gather data from participants using web-based systems to ascertain their judgments about metaphors in order to better model how the language used in political speeches may influence reasoning about social, economic and political issues. I am interested in working with PhD students or post-docs on research projects that examine metaphor in experimental studies and corpora-based analyses.