As Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, I am involved in teaching a wide range of courses dealing with grammar, phonetics, language history, varieties of English, and academic writing. My academic career has taken me from the south-west of Germany (Freiburg, where I received my Ph.D) to the north-east (as a post-doc in Rostock), and now, as a logical continuation, to Lund.

My research interests are in language variation and change, grammaticalization, and phonetic and phonological reduction in spoken language. Much of my work relies on usage data from language corpora, sometimes combined with experimental studies. I take a broadly usage-based perspective on language as a dynamic system represented in the minds of speakers (feel free to ask me what that means exactly).