I just finished a year as a Visiting Full Professor at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and am now looking for new opportunities.
I began my academic career in 1989 at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where I studied for an MA, with a one-semester break for a sholarship at Sheffield University, UK, courtesy of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). I received my MA degree in English Linguistics (major), English Literature (1st minor), and Galloroman Philology (2nd minor) in 1994, and then began the first part of my PhD studies (primarily data collection) there.
In October 1995, I moved to the University of Lancaster, UK, to take up a short PhD scholarship, awarded again by the DAAD. The following year, I decided to continue the PhD in Lancaster, soon switched to part-time status, and finally completed the degree in July 2001. To finance my studies, I worked in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language as a part-time tutor, teaching on a variety of courses, as a research assistant on a project (with Geoffrey Leech) for the University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, as well as a teaching for Informations Systems Services (Word, Excel & VBA Programming, Powerpoint, Access, web & graphics design). In addition, for a short period of time, I taught a course on web design at a college in London, and some more linguistics courses at the University of Central Lancashire.
After completing my PhD, I worked on another project with Geoffrey Leech in the Department of Linguistics, which ended at the end of September 2002, when I returned to Germany. After a brief stint in the former Department of Computational Linguistics at Erlangen University (January 2003 – September 2004), I moved to the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology, where I worked until January 2009.
From April 2009 – January 2010, I substituted for the W2 chair in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, where I also submitted my professorial thesis (Habilitationsschrift) in June 2010.
From July 2010 to June 2013, I was based in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong, where I worked on a corpus of data from Philippine call-centres, as well as continuing my research into the improvement of automated pragmatic annotation/analysis. In January 2011, I received my full professorial qualification (venia legendi) from the University of Bayreuth.
From July 2013 to July 2014, I first worked in the School of English and Education at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as a Visiting Professor, but in August 2014 moved to the National Key Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics within the University. In December 2014, I was formally appointed as Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in Foreign Languages, which, apparently makes me the first foreigner to ever be officially appointed to the level of Professor within the Chinese university system.
From July 2016 – June 2020, I was re-appointed as Yunshan Outstanding Scholar (云山杰出学者) in the Centre. Although I mainly carried out research in this position, I also continued teaching courses in Corpus Linguistics & Programming for Linguistics, both for English and German.
Research Interests
My main interests are in the areas of computer-based pragmatic analysis, corpus linguistics, and phonetics & phonology. Further interests include almost all aspects of corpus-/computer-based analysis of spoken and written language, general English linguistics, as well as designing interactive online course materials & tools for (corpus) linguistic analysis.
My main focus at the moment is on:
- improving my methodology for identifying speech-acts (semi-)automatically,
- applying this methodology to a variety of new corpora, including, ICE and learner data,
- improving existing theories and approaches related to speech acts, speech-act taxonomies, and corpus pragmatics,
- re-implementing my existing tools in Python.