I am professor in English linguistics and "docent" in general linguistics. I hold a doctoral degree (Ph.D) in theoretical linguistics and MA and BA degrees in English Philology.

I am programme coordinator for the international MA programme in language and linguistics.

I am also head of research and research education in English language and linguistics as well as member of the section board for English and German.

As of January 2024 I am also deputy member of the academic appointments board in the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology. 

I am trained in CPR and have attended the university's fire safety courses. 

 I have taught courses academic writing and in English and/general linguistics at all levels, including:

• generative syntax / PhD course
• semantics / PhD level
• supervision of MA and BA theses
• essay writing seminars / BA level
• English descriptive grammar / MA level
• Lexical semantics / MA level
• Linguistic variation and sociolinguistics / MA level
• Syntax / BA level
• Semantics and pragmatics / BA level
• Language and gender / BA level
• English linguistics / Introductory course at B level
• Academic writing / A level
• English grammar / A level
• English phonology and phonetics / A level

I have also developed teaching materials, including two course books, a MOOC and various electronic teaching and learning resouces.

I have BA and MA degrees in English Philology from the University of Tampere in Finland. These degrees included second-subject studies in journalism and mass communication, Nordic languages/Swedish, social psychology and psychology. I also hold a PhD degree in theoretical linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, where I defended my thesis Manner adverbials and the structure of Finnish sentences: A minimalist approach in 1999. I was promoted to 'docent' in general linguistics in 2005, and to professor in English linguistics in 2012. 

Most of my research in the 2000s was in the field of theoretical linguistics / syntax, and focussed on Finnish and the other Finnic languages, and on English. Besides adverb/ials and their positions, I have worked on prepositional and postpositional phrases; on the structure of relative clauses; and on argument structure and realization, with emphasis on Finnish passive and impersonal constructions.

In the 2010s I and a group of colleagues at Lund developed an interest in academic writing in English in non-native speaker contexts. We have developed course materials and other resources, including a MOOC, for teaching and learning, and we have given a number of presentations and published papers that fall in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning. This initiative has also produced collaborations with other universities.

My current main research interest is the study of ideophones and other expressive items in Finnish, English and Swedish. Much of this work is done in collaboration with Dr Maria Wiktorsson from Malmö University. Besides the forms and functions of ideophonic / expressive vocabulary items in these languages, we are interested in how such items are defined in dictionaries, as well as how they are translated from one language to another. An important part of the ideophone work is to examine their occurrence in comics, cartoons and other multimodal texts: what kinds of items are used, for what purposes, and what is their role in the multimodal narrative. We are also interested in the translation strategies that are used, when such texts are translated between languages, and if there are differences between the three languages.

Previously I have looked at translations in a project led by Dr Alexander Bareis (The German Unit, Lund University), where the aim was to examine if and how the readings of a literary work change as it is translated into different languages, and how the properties of the target languages determine what is, or can be, translated and in what way.