I am a linguist at the TU Chemnitz and study how language interacts with other modalities, such as gestures or pictures. Together with Prof. Dr. Ellen Fricke I am heading the center “gesture studies and speech communication” at the TU Chemnitz.
In my research, I have addressed semantization and grammaticalization of gestures, pragmatic and cognitive aspects of gesture use as well methodological and theoretical questions of gesture analysis.
My current research projects concentrate on the relevance of gestures for teaching German as a second language, I conduct cross-linguistic studies on conventionalized gestures and analyze how linguistic ambiguity is realized in speech, gestures, text, pictures and sound.
My main areas of research are multimodality (speech/gesture and text/image), interactional and gesture studies, language and cognition, lexical semantics and pragmatics.
You can find more information about me in my CV, on researchgate or Twitter. News on events and trainings can also be found at the center “gesture studies and speech communication“.