Marcin Opacki

Basic information

Position: assistant professor

Field: linguistics

Specializations: psycholinguistics, syntax, corpus linguistics

E-mail: <marcin.opacki@uw.edu.pl>

Office Address: Faculty of Modern Languages, UW, ul. Dobra 55, 00-312 Warsaw, Poland, Room: 3.237

Academic profile

I am a linguist and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw. My research interests are founded upon three pillars: theoretical linguistics (syntax and syntactic theories), natural language processing (corpus linguistics), and psycholinguistics (grammaticality judgements, cross-linguistic influence).

One can say that I am mainly interested in how linguistic knowledge and linguistic information can be represented through the use of descriptive grammars. I am also interested in rule- and constraint-based systems in general. I consider experimental research a crucial proving ground for linguistic theories, a much needed bridge between the empirical and the rational, hence my participation in the LingLab team.

My projects focus primarily on how existing linguistic theories can be used to investigate linguistic phenomena and communication abilities, especially in contexts such as bilingualism, multilingualism, as well as first and second language acquisition.

Research interests

Some overarching questions that define my academic exploits include:

• What social, environmental, and psychological factors contribute to language skills and communication abilities?
• How does the information load of particular linguistic signs influence language processing, language acquisition, and language learning?
• How do the various structures (“layers”) of natural language (e.g. syntax, semantics, pragmatics) constrain and regulate each other?
• What factors contribute to the perception of grammaticality, well-formedness, and acceptability?
• To what extent are the aforementioned factors related to cross-linguistic influence and prior language knowledge?
• How can we use linguistic theories of grammar to operationalize the abstract structures of natural language for the purpose of linguistic research?
• How do different methods of operationalization (especially the aforementioned descriptive grammars) influence construct validity?

Past work

Throughout my career as a linguist, I have been involved in several research projects funded by a variety of agencies and consortia. These have included work on the following:

• a study of the language of bilingual migrant children (NPRH)
• the development of a framework for CLIL in vocational education and training (Erasmus+)
• an evaluation of language teaching in Polish primary schools (BENJA),
• Walenty: the Polish Valency Dictionary (CESAR, NEKST, CLARIN-ERIC)
• the development of a staff training program in computational linguistics for academics (NCBiR)
• the development of a CLIL-based program that fosters critical thinking aimed at Polish high school students (NCBiR)

Published lab-related work can be found in the publications section of this site, while an up-to-date list of my exploits and employment history is available via the various links below.