My primary domain of interest and expertise as a cognitive linguist includes the realm of pragmatics, the use of prosody and nonverbal communication in utterance interpretation, and the role of multimodality in interlanguage and instructional pragmatics.

The second strand of my research focuses on analysing the pragmatics of discursive manipulation and deception in the context of online child sexual grooming, within the field of investigative and forensic text analysis, with a view to detecting and preventing cybercrimes.

My broader research interests include linguistic variation and change (particularly at the level of sounds), New Zealand English, uptalk, literary nonsense and the teaching of linguistics, corpus pragmatics & forensic stylistics.

External voluntary roles

• Reviewer for the Journal of Corpus Pragmatics (2023-)
• Reviewer for Pragmatics & Cognition
• Reviewer for Cambridge University Press and Routledge (2024/2025-)

Memberships

• Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment (CRELLA)
• UKALTA
• International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
• Relevance Researchers' Network

Areas of enquiry for PhD supervision include, but are not limited to:

• Pragmatics
• Interlanguage and Instructional Pragmatics
• Pragmatics & prosody
• Multimodality (prosody and gesture in interaction)
• First and second language development, (social) cognition, pointing, salience and psychology
• Relevance theory
• Pragmatics of humour (irony & sarcasm in TV sitcoms) and comprehension of L2 humour
• Pragmatics of manipulative discourse (forensic linguistics)
• Pragmatic Stylistics: Linguistics and Literature in the English classroom
• or a combination of these areas