Ryan Dux, Ph.D.

Dr. Ryan Dux received his B.A. from The University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin, and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. He has also spent four academic years in Germany, including research stays as a Fulbright Scholar and as a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

As a descendant of German-American immigrants, Dr. Dux researches German-American communities to document and investigate their languages and cultural practices. He has worked extensively with the Texas German Dialect Project and conducted independent research on the Pomeranian Low German community near his hometown in Wisconsin. In addition to integrating this work into his courses, Dr. Dux enjoys involving students in this research, allowing them to gain valuable experience in interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, and linguistic and cultural analysis.

Dr. Dux also conducts linguistic research, particularly in cognitive and usage-based frameworks such as Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. He investigates German and English verb classes (i.e. sets of near-synonymous verbs) to address theoretical questions surrounding the relation between verb meaning and syntax. The German-English comparisons in this research also reveal translation mismatches which have implications for (bilingual) lexicography and language pedagogy. This research has aided in developing the German Frame-Based Online Lexicon, a German-English lexical resource that provides detailed grammatical and cultural information based on naturally-occurring examples.

Outside of academia, Dr. Dux enjoys listening to (and trying to play) folk and bluegrass music, cheering on the Green Bay Packers, and exploring new places with his family.

Current Research Interests

  • German-American Studies
  • Language contact and multilingualism
  • Contrastive (German-English) Linguistics
  • Cognitive Linguistics (Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar)
  • Applied linguistics and language pedagogy
  • Word meaning and its relation to grammar

Selective publications/works/Conferences

Dux, Ryan. Submitted. Frame-Constructional Verb Classes: Change and Theft in English and German. Accepted pending revisions in book series Constructional Approaches to Language (Benjamins). (Revisions to be submitted in December 2019.)

Dux, Ryan. 2018a. “Texas German and English Word Order Constructions in Contact.” In: Hans Boas and Steffen Höder (eds.), Constructions in Contact (Benjamins). 211-249

Dux, Ryan. 2018b. “Frames, Verbs, and Constructions: German Constructions with Verbs of Stealing.” In: Alexander Ziem and Hans C. Boas (eds.), Approaching German Syntax from a Constructionist Perspective. (de Gruyter). 367-405.

Dux, Ryan. Submitted. “Wisconsin Pomeranian Low German.” In: Mark Louden, Hans C. Boas, Ana Deumert, and Péter Maitz (eds.), Varieties of German Worldwide. (Oxford Univ. Press). Submitted December 2016.

Dux, Ryan. In press. “Word Order Constructions and Language Contact: The Case of Texas German.” In: Hans C. Boas and Steffen Höder (eds.), Constructions in Contact (Benjamins). To appear November 2018.

Dux, Ryan. 2018. “Frames, Verbs, and Constructions: German Constructions with Verbs of Stealing.” In: Alexander Ziem and Hans C. Boas (eds.), Approaching German Syntax from a Constructionist Perspective. (de Gruyter). 367-405.

Boas, Hans C., and Ryan Dux. 2017a. “From the Past into the Present: From Case Frames to Semantic Frames.” In: Alexander Bergs, Abigail C. Cohn, and Jeff Good (eds.), Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0003

Dux, Ryan. 2017b “Classifying Language Contact Phenomena: English Verbs in Texas German.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 29 (4): 279-430. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542717000034

Boas, Hans C., Ryan Dux, and Alexander Ziem. 2016a. “Frames and Constructions in a German-Online Learner’s Dictionary.” In: De Knop, Sabine and Gaëtanelle Gilquin (eds.), Constructionist Approaches to Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. (de Gruyter). 303-326.

Dux, Ryan. 2016b. A Usage-Based Approach to Verb Classes in English and German. Ph.D. Dissertation: Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Boas, Hans C., and Ryan Dux. 2013. “Semantic Frames for Foreign Language Education: Towards a German Frame-based Dictionary.” Veredas: Frame Semantics and its Technological Applications. 82-100. http://www.ufjf.br/revistaveredas/edicoes-2013

List of courses regularly taught at SHSU

German 1411: Elementary German I

German 1412: Elementary German II

German 2312: Intermediate German II

German 3368: German Media

German 4370: Topics in German Studies