English Department - About Us

Originally from the southern Black Forest, I studied English and Political Science at Universität Hamburg (MA, 2010) and the University of Technology, Sydney (2005). Between 2012–2017, I was a doctoral assistant at Freie Universität Berlin (PhD, 2017). In 2017, I joined the Université de Neuchâtel as an SNF post-doctoral researcher. In the winter term of 2019, I was visiting professor of English Linguistics at the Universität Leipzig, teaching seminars in sociolinguistics, syntax, and corpus methods and a lecture history of the English language.

I am a usage-based linguist and mainly interested in the interaction between lexis and syntax. For example, which verbs go into an argument structure construction and which don't? Can we say why? I work mainly from a corpus linguistic perspective — and I often investigate lots of data — but I also have a keen interest in experimental methods. The challenge when working with corpora to investigate what it means to know a language is how we can deal with the fact that corpora are incredibly noisy, incomplete samples of our linguistic experience — in brief, how we can make the best use of bad data.

In my spare time, I love skiing and hiking and listening to scientific podcasts.

Current courses FS 2020

• Introduction to Linguistics II (seminar, Tue 16–18)
• Psycholinguistics (seminar, Mon 12–14)

Office hours FS 2020

• Mon, 15.30–17.30 (or by appointment), PLH 207

More info (more to follow here):

• sfla.ch
• YouTube channel (talks & tutorials)