About me

I’m Chadi [ˈʃɛdi; SHE-dee], a postdoctoral researcher at the English Institute at the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. I grew up in باجة Beja, Tunisia, then left rather early to Paris, France, where I –among other things– started my journey in linguistics research.

I’m a linguist that uses computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics methodologies to investigate a diverse range of cognitive, structural, and sociocultural questions; with a focus on techniques that allow for the quantitative analysis of low resource languages and imbalanced/sample biased data sets. My dissertation work focuses on Multi-Word Expressions (MWE), using corpus linguistics informed measures and the Julia programming language. Currently, I work in Dr. Martin Hilpert’s lab as a postdoc researcher. My postdoc project—Detecting connectivity changes inductively in a network of constructions—aims at contributing to the development of Diachronic Construction Grammar (Noël 2007, Traugott and Trousdale 2013, Hilpert 2021) as a general theory of language change.

I obtained my BA in English Philology (linguistics, literature, culture and civilization), and my MA in Linguistics from the Université Paris 8, Vincennes–Saint-Denis. After occupying the position of lecturer in the department of French and Italian at UCSB, I joined the Linguistics department as a PhD student, where I obtained my PhD in Lingusitics under the supervision of Dr. Stefan Th. Gries.

I also play guitar, chess, and spend (not enough) time watching films, TV series, and listening to Metal, Grunge, Punk, Alternative rock, Trip-Hop, modern Arabic music… I love cooking and have to often deal with my stealthy cat hunting for (easy) prays around the kitchen.

^* First author.