Welcome
As a full professor (chair) of linguistics, I currently teach both undergraduate and graduate students and conduct research on present-day phenomena (multimodal interaction) and variation & change in Romance Languages (French, Spanish, Italian and Creole), focusing two main research areas:
-
Linguistic research is increasingly characterized by the assumption that language needs to be investigated in its natural habitat, as it were, namely in the context of social and often bodily interaction. Consequently, the first research area is concerned with an investigation of the grammar and pragmatics of Romance languages and varieties in multimodal interaction. In this research area, I strive for a better understanding of how linguistic and bodily ressources are used in everyday talk-in-interaction and in clinical settings, with a recent focus on collaborative story-telling.
-
Since my PhD and postdoc work, I have been investigating the emergence of new languages and varieties (French-based Creoles in the Caribbean and high contact varieties of Spanish and Latin America Spanish). Over the past few years, my investigation has shifted its focus to the negotiation of linguistic forms and structures in face-to-face and web-based interaction. From this modified perspective, I investigate both typologically -related (Romance) languages as well as contact situations between typologically quite different languages (Spanish and Guaraní/Quechua, French and Arabic/Wolof).