I studied at the University of Cologne and then completed a MA by research in Linguistics at SUNY Buffalo.

For my PhD I moved to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and began fieldwork on Saliba, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea.

In 2000 I started a two-year postdoctoral project at the University of Melbourne and since 2002 I have been a member of the Linguistics Program here at Monash University.

Research

My main research interests lie in the areas of language documentation and analysis, linguistic typology, the interaction of speech and gesture, cross-linguistic mapping of semantics and syntax, language change and the discourse-syntax interface. Some areas I have particularly worked in are listed below.

Language documentation, description and analysis

Event representation, three-participant events, caused motion

Co-speech gestures in caused motion expressions

Valence & transitivity

Narratives, pronouns, reference tracking

Demonstratives, spatial deixis

I have been supervising research theses at Honours, Masters and PhD level in a range of areas, including:

Language documentation, analysis and grammatical description

Co-speech gestures

Event-representation & caused motion 

Semantic-syntax mapping

Syntax-discourse interface

Narrative structure

Psycholinguistics

Child language acquisition

Historical linguistics, lexical reconstruction