He received his Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Basel, Switzerland with a thesis in diachronic Italian linguistics on the history and etymology of Friulian family names (Northern Italy). His current research interests include conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, multimodality and the use of language in mobile environments. In his work he has focused particularly on syntactic marked structures in French conversation and on decision-making sequences in customer-to-customer interaction at the point of sale. He is currently directing a research project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, studying the use of place names and spatial descriptions in various settings of social interaction.