As a linguist, my interests are in the area of lexical semantics.

Antonymy

• My dissertation (1997, Northwestern University) is entitled Antonymy and Semantic Range in English. It focuses on the question of what makes two words antonyms, e.g., why large is paired with small but not with little. It is available on-line here.
• I have also done some work on antonymy in Japanese as part of a cross-linguistic project on antonymy with The Comparative Lexical Relations Group.
, resulting in one publication (so far): Muehleisen, Victoria and Maho Isono. 2009. Antonymous adjectives in Japanese discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1, 2185-2203 .

The use of corpora in the study of the lexicon.

• To research antonymy in Japanese, I have been using the Japanese corpus of the Leeds Collection of Internet Corpora.
• My dissertation includes three cases studies which use data from a large corpus.
• A while back, I used data from the Bank of English corpus created by COBUILD at Birmingham University to help students understand the differences in English words and phrases that are often confused.

Metaphorical extension

• This is an old interest which I'd like to get back to some day. At the 1997 International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Amsterdam, I did a poster presentation on the ways the adjectives "hard" and "soft" have been extended to a wide range of uses. I'd like to return to this topic again some time using historic corpus data.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I also have interests in applied linguistics.

Learner corpora

• I have been working on creating a fairly large corpus of learner English, called the SILS Learner Corpus, and I've just started using it to look at students' written language. For more information, see:
  • Descriptions of the construction of the SILS Learner Corpus published in the Waseda Global Forum in 2006 and presented at the Universite catholique de Louvain in September 2007.
  • Work in progress on students' strategies in quotation and paraphrasing, presented at the JALT 2007 conference.

Cross-cultural and bilingual exchanges

• For the past decade my students have worked with classes in the the U.S. (in Utah, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Kansas), in Taiwan, in Malaysia, and in Korea. These exchanges have involved various combinations of the following: e-mail exchange, video-conferencing, teleconferencing, blogging, and the exchange of student-made videos.
• The longest running (and on-going) exchange has been with students of Japanese at the University of Colorado at Boulder, taught by Prof. Hideko Shimizu. We made two conference presentations on this project in 2006:
  • Enhancing Communication and Cultural Understanding Among JFL Learners. A presentation with Hideko Shimizu of the University of Colorado at Boulder, at the International Conference on Japanese Language Education、New York. August 5, 2006. (The PowerPoint is available on-line here.)
  • Creating a Community through Asynchronous Communication: Blogging vs. E-mail. A presentation with Hideko Shimizu of the University of Colorado at Boulder, at the １１th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, Kangwon National Chuncheon, South Korea．Published on-line in on-line at the Proceedings of the 11th Conference of PAAL.
  From fall 2010, we are planning a project using Facebook for student interaction.