Speaker
Professor Jesus Olguín-Martínez
The University of Hong Kong
Jesús Olguín-Martínez received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in December 2022. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Following his postdoctoral appointment, he joined Illinois State University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Theoretical Linguistics, where he served from 2023 to 2025. In 2026, he joined the University of Hong Kong Linguistics Department, where he currently holds a Tenure-Track faculty position.
Jesús is a typologist working at the intersection of corpus linguistics, Construction Grammar, cognitive and quantitative linguistics, and community-based language documentation.
He has published more than 30 journal articles in well-known journals, such as Linguistic Typology, Folia Linguistica, Studies in Language, Functions of Language, Constructions and Frames, Cognitive Semantics, Journal of Language Contact, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, Journal of World Languages, and STUF-Language Typology and Universals, among many others. His work has received international recognition. In 2025, he was awarded the Anna Siewierska Award by the Societas Linguistica Europaea for the best article published in Folia Linguistica in 2024.
Beyond his research, Jesús is an active educator. He has been invited to teach specialized courses and deliver lectures on linguistic typology and corpus linguistics at prestigious events, such as the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Institute.
Event Details
Linguistic typology has traditionally been interested in two-way interactions of linguistic features in language use, such as if a language has property A, then it also has property B (Cysouw 2005: 562).
In this presentation, I introduce a new methodological approach to linguistic typology and corpus-based analysis that provides a higher degree of descriptive accuracy than research on two-way interactions: TYPE- AND ANTITYPE-BASED COMPARISON (e.g., Olguín Martínez & Rogers 2024; Olguín Martínez & Gries 2024; Olguín Martínez & Gries, 2026). In this approach, special attention is paid to how syntax, lexicon, discourse, and semantics fit together in a unified model, i.e., how syntactic factors interact with lexical, discourse, and semantic factors in language use and which configurations of features are preferred (i.e. occur more often than expected by chance, which in the literature are referred to as TYPES) or dispreferred (i.e. occur less often than expected by chance, which in the literature are referred to as ANTITYPES).
In type- and antitype-based comparison, there is no conceptual directionality, i.e., there are no dependent or independent variables, as in popular regression models. Instead, linguistic variables show different degrees of association strength giving rise to cross-clausal associations. Accordingly, types and antitypes can lead us to a better understanding of the ranges of factors involved in the entrenchment of constructions and a deeper theoretical understanding of how speakers organize their grammatical knowledge.
Enquires
lin@cuhk.edu.hk
