Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder

As a full professor (chair) of linguistics, I currently teach both undergraduate and graduate students and conduct research on multimodal interaction and variation & change in Romance Languages (French, Spanish, Italian and Creole), and German. Linguistic research is increasingly characterized by the assumption that language needs to be investigated in its natural habitat, as it were, namely in the context of social and often bodily interaction. My research is concerned with an investigation of multimodal interaction across the lifespan, including mother-infant dyads in the attachment paradigm, romantic couples in everyday ecologies and systemic couple therapy and trauma narratives of Holocaust survivors. In my current research, I strive for a better understanding of how linguistic and bodily ressources are used in everyday talk-in-interaction and in clinical settings, with a recent focus on collaborative story-telling.