The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing (Albert Einstein)

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants (Isaac Newton, 1675)

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I ---

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference (from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, 1916)

I am interested in how figurative, metaphoric languages reveal the way we conceptualise our experiences with the world, such as with the concepts of TIME (e.g., here) and EMOTION (e.g., here). My other interests are in lexical-semantic, morphological, and syntactic phenomena, and more recently in Austronesian historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology. Theoretically, my work is couched within a broader framework of Cognitive Linguistics, especially the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Frame Semantics approach to metaphor (MetaNet), and the usage-based, constructionist approach. Methodologically, I integrate computational technique and quantitative corpus linguistics in studying languages based on databases of digitalised texts (the so-called "language corpora"). I use the R programming language as the main research tool for all things data science in linguistics (visit the list of my current research). From 2023, I work as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Grant on developing lexical resources for Enggano.

The aforementioned research interests and theoretical orientations, in one way or another, have been the theme(s) of my Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD theses. One of the topics discussed in my PhD thesis is how near-synonyms of an emotion concept, in this case, HAPPINESS in Indonesian, exhibit distinct statistical preferences to be described by certain metaphors; this suggests nuances associated with the synonyms. The topic addresses a theoretical assumption in the cognitive-linguistic approach to emotion semantics (cf. Kövecses 1990), namely that emotions, including those near-synonyms, are associated with specific metaphors that can distinguish the synonyms from one another. The Indonesian paper discussing a part of such analyses can be downloaded here. Also, check out (i) my 2017 invited interview (in Indonesian) for SBS Radio Australia about this topic and (ii) my paper on happiness metaphors in Classical Malay and Indonesian (download the author's accepted full-text). The data and codes for my PhD thesis are published here as an R package called happyr. In April 2020, my PhD thesis was awarded "High Commendation" for the 2019 Faculty of Arts Outstanding PhD Thesis by the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Australia.

topic: happiness; source: 9gag

I have also begun exploring other empirical methods, such as experiments and co-speech gestures, to find convergence/divergence between different types of evidence (i.e. linguistic and non-linguistic/behavioural evidence). My preliminary research along these lines includes (i) investigating co-speech gestures accompanying temporal language (with Poppy Siahaan and Alice Gaby; the published paper is here) and negation (with Poppy Siahaan; full paper); (ii) investigating usage patterns of Indonesian INGESTION predicates based on the corpus data and sentence-production task (with I Made Rajeg and John Newman); and (iii) investigating the interaction of grammatical voice of words and their metaphoric meanings in Indonesian (with I Made Rajeg and I Wayan Arka), combining the quantitative corpus-linguistic and sentence-production experiment (the open-access, published papers are here and here). See also this page for the list of my current research, and please visit my Figshare profiles (Personal Figshare and bridges.monash.edu) for further details on my research outputs (all #OpenAccess). Also, follow me on Mastodon! Since April 2024, I have established and led a research group called CompLexico (Computer-assisted Lexicology and Lexicography).

Beyond research

Since June 2019, I have been one of the Figshare ambassadors in/from Indonesia. I strive to foster an open science mindset and practice, especially for Indonesian linguists and linguistics; see my one-page popular article (with Megan Hardeman) about my story and some of the impacts of doing open science.

topic: arXiv.org; source: xkcd

I have also been following the updates on how the assessment of researchers and their research outputs should be improved by not solely relying on (i) skewed metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and/or H-index, and (ii) the venue in which research output is published (see also the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment [SF DORA] and the Leiden Manifesto for more details).

I am also a certified instructor (under the name "Gede Rajeg") for teaching The Carpentries lessons, especially the R programming language. I received my Carpentries certification in 2018 when I was a member of the instructor team at the Monash Data Fluency for Research (2018 - 2019), where I helped co-teach basic coding skills (esp. R) for Monash University researchers and beyond.

Since April 2020, I have set up a YouTube channel containing linguistics-related topics and digital research tools.

Highlights

Presentation on the corpus-based study of verbal and nominal affixation in Indonesian

Karlina Denistia and I co-presented our co-authored book chapters as part of the corpus-based, contemporary Indonesian grammar project (flyer) by the national language agency of Indonesia. Access the recorded live-streaming (in Indonesian) on YouTube here (for Denistia & Rajeg's 2023 paper on nominal affixation in Indonesian) and here (for Rajeg & Denistia's 2023 paper on verbal affixation in Indonesian).

A new paper published in early 2023!

My co-authored paper on the history of happiness metaphors in Classical Malay and Indonesian has been published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics since Valentine's Day 2023 💝! Download the authors' accepted manuscript here; request the publisher version via ResearchGate; read the lay-person summary at Kudos; download the underlying data and R codes for the Classical Malay and the Indonesian data.

Philofest ID 2022

I have been invited to a dialogue session at the Philofest ID 2022 (11 December 2022) to discuss "nature vs. nurture" in light of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics.

Workshop on "Austronesian argument alternations in discourse"

I have been invited to co-present (with I Wayan Arka) at the workshop on Austronesian argument alternations in discourse (28-29 November 2022) at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, ACT. The workshop is part of the project titled Where does grammar come from? The cognitive basis of transitivity and grammatical relation.

Guest lecture on corpus-based approach to syntax

I have been invited to deliver a guest lecture on the topic titled Analisis Korpus dalam Kajian Sintaksis (Corpus-based Analysis of Syntax) at the Arabic Department of the IAIN Syekh Nurjati, Cirebon (10 May 2022) (flyer, slides, and live-streaming recording). 

Basic text manipulation with stringr

I have been invited to talk about basic text manipulation with the stringr R package at the R-Ladies Jakarta 15th meetup on 2 April 2022 (recording). The workshop materials (in Indonesian) are published on a GitHub page (source codes).