Stefan Th. Gries is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen. He was a Visiting Chair (2013–2017) of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, the Leibniz Professor (spring semester 2017) at the Research Academy Leipzig of the Leipzig University, and visiting professor at the 2007, 2011, 2013, and 2015 LSA Linguistic Institutes at Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Chicago.
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 in English and Russian) 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 and he is the author of two (2nd ed.) textbooks on using R for statistical analysis in linguistics (2013, <https://tinyurl.com/statforlingwithr>) and for corpus linguistics (2016, <https://tinyurl.com/quantcorplingwithr>).
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 without being a cognitive linguist in the narrower sense of following any one particular cognitive-linguistic theory.
