I am Professor of Semantics at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf.

My research is motivated by my long-standing interest in conceptual foundations of semantics, drawing on the logical/formal and cognitive research traditions. My main focus is on aspect, genericity, mass/count distinction, mereological semantics, interaction of noun phrase semantics with verbal aspect, (in)definiteness, context-dependence in semantic interpretation, integration of formal and lexical semantics. Languages from which I often tend to draw my data are English, German, Czech, Russian, Polish, French and Italian.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. My thesis advisors were Paul Kay, Charles J. Fillmore, Sam Mchombo and Alan Timberlake. My thesis, entitled Aspect, Eventuality Types and Noun Phrase Semantics, was published in the OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS IN LINGUISTICS series, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Before coming to Düsseldorf I taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, at the University of Rochester in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Florida. I also held appointments as a computational linguist at SRI International in Menlo Park, in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley working in the Artificial Intelligence Group, and as a research associate at Berkeley Speech Technologies, Inc.