Her research focuses on pragmatics and discourse analysis, particularly the identification of the types of contexts appropriate for sentences with marked word order.
She has been part of a movement to expand the field's understanding of how information structure (one's familiarity with the referents being discussed) affects the interpretations of sentences with different word orders, especially in English utterances with constituent inversion.
Inversion is the term for sentence types where the parts before and after the verb switch places.
[1] She worked for two years in a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.
She is currently a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science in the English department at Northern Illinois University.
[2] She has also served as an instructor at the 2007 LSA Summer Institute at Stanford University.
[3] In addition to scholarly monographs and journal articles, in the 1990s she wrote and edited a series of brochures for the Linguistic Society of America that explained for the general public such topics as Bilingualism,[4] Is English Changing?
[6] The volume Cambridge Grammar of the English Language to which she contributed was the winner of the 2004 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America.
“Discourse Effects of Word Order Variation.” In K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, and P. Portner, eds., Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning.
“Noncanonical Word Order and the Distribution of Inferrable Information in English.” In B. Shaer, P. Cook, and W. Frey, eds.
Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn.
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, in collaboration with Laurie Bauer, Betty J. Birner, Ted Briscoe, Peter Collins, David Denison, David Lee, Anita Mittwoch, Geoffrey Nunberg, Frank Palmer, John Payne, Peter Peterson, Lesley Stirling, and Gregory Ward.