As an applied linguist, I have been fascinated by the study of interaction and communication in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts for many years. I have done extensive research on achieving understanding and resolving miscommunication (non-/misunderstanding) and on linguistic creativity, with a particular emphasis on the creative use of idioms and metaphors. A recurring theme in my work is the use of ELF in professional settings, especially language use in business meetings.
My current research focuses on communication in Transient International Groups (TIGs). I am the principal investigator of the ELF in TIGs project (2019-22), which has the aim of establishing a conceptual and methodological framework for the study of communication in transient lingua franca contexts, i.e. situations that are too short-lived, fleeting or unstable to be considered communities of practice. For this purpose, I am currently developing a micro-diachronic approach for the analysis of (spoken) interaction in order to provide more detailed empirical descriptions of how language changes in real-time interactions.
My research is influenced by and draws upon corpus linguistics, which it combines with conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. Since I am one of the creators of VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), I have a strong background in spoken corpus building using naturally-occurring multilingual lingua franca data. I am also principal investigator of the VOICE CLARIAH project (2020-21), an interdisciplinary digital humanities project that updates and enhances the open-access VOICE Online interface for applied linguists and corpus users worldwide.
As of September 2020, I hold a position as Elise-Richter Research Fellow at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My previous affiliations include positions at the University of Vienna, TU Dortmund University and Paris-Lodron University Salzburg. In October 2020, I received the Venia docendi (Habilitation) for English linguistics from the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna.