A short academic biography

Professor of General Linguistics

Director, NCCR Evolving Language

Director, Distributional Linguistics Lab

Email

I got my graduate training in the Cognitive Anthropology Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and received my Ph.D. degree in 1997 from the University of Zürich. From 1995 through 1998 I taught part-time in Zürich and worked as a researcher at the University of Mainz. I then spent three years at the University of California, Berkeley, on a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2001 I completed my Habilitation at Zürich and was awarded an extracurricular professorship (Förderungsprofessur) by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2002 until 2011, I was professor of linguistic typology and variation at the University of Leipzig (Institute of Linguistics), and in 2011 I took over the chair of general linguistics at the University of Zürich. Since 2020 I am director of the research center NCCR Evolving Language.

My core research question is what's where why in language. I want to uncover the conditions that shape the spatio-temporal dynamics of language, and I seek to understand their nature in the light of human evolution.