My domains of interest and expertise include the realm of pragmatics, the use of prosody and nonverbal communication in utterance interpretation, and the role of multimodality in interlanguage pragmatics. As a cognitive linguist, I apply relevance theory – a cognitive theory of utterance interpretation – to develop L2 learners’ oral inferential abilities based on their increased attention to and reading of the speaker’s paralinguistic behaviours. More specifically, my research explores the role of multimodal pointing in interlanguage and instructional pragmatics. My broader research interests include literary nonsense and the teaching of linguistics, pragmatics & stylistics, and forensic linguistics.

I am a reviewer for the Journal of Pragmatics, Corpus Pragmatics, and CUP.

I am a member of the Relevance Researchers’ Network - Relevance Researchers' Network , the International Association for Teaching Pragmatics (ITAP), and the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

I am interested in supervising students in the following (sub)disciplines:

• Interlanguage Pragmatics / Instructional Pragmatics
• Relevance theory and Instructed SLA
• Pragmatics of humour (irony) and assessing irony comprehension in the L2
• Pragmatics & prosody
• Multimodality (prosody and gesture in interaction)
• First and second language development, (social) cognition and psychology
• or a combination of these areas