Welcome!

I am Chair of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Augsburg. In my research, I am interested in how participants use verbal, vocal, and visual resources for meaning-making in social interaction, how patterned form-meaning pairings emerge in language use, and how language use may show change and variation across time and space. Before coming to Augsburg, I taught at the Universities of Bonn, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Heidelberg, Hildesheim, Linköping, Potsdam, and Würzburg.
I studied English Linguistics and Medieval Literature, Scandinavian Languages, and Cross-cultural Communication at the Universities of Munich and Umeå, before receiving an MA from the University of Munich. I obtained my doctoral and postdoctoral degrees from the University of Potsdam.
My research interests focus on (diachronic) interactional linguistics / conversation analysis, prosody in conversation, corpus-assisted discourse analysis as well as variational and historical pragmatics. I published two monographs, "Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time. Exploring recent change" (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and "Affectivity in Interaction: Sound objects in English" (John Benjamins, 2012), the Virtual Special Issue “Diachronic pragmatics: Perspectives on spoken English” in Journal of Pragmatics (co-edited with Andreas H. Jucker, 2023), as well as the co-edited volumes "Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings: Social encounters in time and space" (with Cornelia Gerhardt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), "Prosody and Embodiment in Interactional Grammar" (with Pia Bergmann, Jana Brenning, and Martin Pfeiffer, 2012, de Gruyter), and "Prosody in Interaction" (with Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, and Margret Selting, 2010, John Benjamins).
In 2016, I was a visiting scholar, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara (Faculty sponsor: Geoffrey Raymond). Together with Cornelia Gerhardt, I was the director of the scientific network “Multimodality and Embodied Interaction”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, 2012-2019). Between 2016 and 2020, I was an associated member of the research program “Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages” (directors: Jan Lindström, Jenny Nilsson, Catrin Norrby, Camilla Wide), funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.