About me

I am a linguist currently working at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. My research interests include historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, first language acquisition, multilingualism, and language evolution research. Here you can find an overview of my work as well as selected materials (e.g., teaching materials and the data my empirical work is based on).

Some current projects

• The life and death of constructional idioms. This project investigates how title-based constructional idioms (e.g. [X shades of Y], [Lord of the X], [X in the times of Y], [X on the verge of a nervous breakdown] etc.) develop over time in German, English, Spanish and Italian. (Collaborator: Lena Stutz, HHU Düsseldorf; funded by the German Research Foundation [DFG]).
• Mocking Metaphor: The use of figurative language in parody religions. This project is part of CRC 1475 "Metaphors of Religion". It investigates the role of conceptual metaphor in parody religions in comparison to "actual" religions.
• Morphology Materializing: Morpheme forms and bondaries in spontaneously written language. This project investigates the influence of mporphological boundaries on written language. (Collaborator: Kristian Berg, University of Bonn; funded by the German Research Foundation [DFG]).
• Extremist narratives: In the context of the EU-funded ARENAS project, we investigate how extremist narratives manifest linguistically. (Collaborators: Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes, Rolf Kailuweit, Alexander Ziem, HHU Düsseldorf)