CV & Research Fields
I studied English and German at Humboldt University Berlin (HU, 1970s). As the best student of my year (English linguistics and literature studies) at the end of the basic studies period, I was chosen to write reports on the progression of the level of complexity and difficulty in the consecutive grammatical exercises of a series of English language practice books at university level for German students of English.
In addition to my studies at HU, I was also educated, for shorter periods of time, at Goldsmiths' College and the Department of Phonetics of University College London (both University of London), attending lectures/seminars by, e.g., Professor J.D. O'Connor and Professor John Wells and courses by Jack Windsor Lewis.
For my M.A. thesis (HU) investigating the problem of genuine vs. synthetic compounds in English (1979, "Word-formations of the types 'language teacher' and lawbreaker'", in German), I was awarded the Mildred Harnack-Fish Prize (Faculty Prize). I then became a member of the English Department of HU, where I obtained a Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in English Language (Linguistics) in 1985. My dissertation ("The 'Verb + Noun' compounds and their word-formation-structural synonyms in English and in German", in German), supervised by Klaus Hansen, was based on a study of structural synonymy in English word-formation, using the abstract concept of word-formation meaning, and took a comparative view of the German word-formation system.
With word-formation being an essential element of my research and teaching at HU all the time, I contributed a longer article on morphological restrictions on English word-formation to the comprehensive publication Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe (2015).
As a Lecturer, later Senior Lecturer/Reader, from the very beginning I taught seminars in English phonetics/phonology and English lexicology (word-formation, lexical semantics, phraseology). Later, I also taught English syntax and grammatical ("inflectional") categories of the English verb/noun/adjective. Additionally, I taught linguistic problems of terminology, based on my understanding of English lexicology and the English system of denomination and contrasting English and German, as well as Language for Specific Purposes. I also led advanced seminars on English prosody.
I have been investigating varieties of English and issues of English historical linguistics, also giving lectures and seminars as well as publishing in both subdisciplines. For more than twenty years now, I have been doing research on L2 varieties of English in West Africa in particular as well as in South Asia. In this context, I initiated and participated in a third-party-funded research project on English in West Africa, with field study in West African countries and the inclusion of advanced students in my research seminars.
I supervised many M.A. theses, mostly in the following fields: linguistic problems of terminologies, contrasting English and German; dialects of English; English in Africa; English-related pidgins and creoles.
I am one of the two main editors of a dictionary of Indian English originally compiled by the late Uwe Carls. This dictionary is the most comprehensive and the most up-to-date of its kind (cf. the reviews by Lambert in World Englishes, 2019, and by Lange in Anglia, 2019).
I am also one of the compilers of a dictionary of West African English (ongoing project).
Furthermore, for more than 25 years, I worked as a forensic linguist, writing expert reports for government offices in Germany and other European countries as well as making statements in German law courts of different types and of different levels of jurisdiction.
I am retired now, however, still doing research.