I am currently a lecturer in the department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. My research interests are diverse but congregate around the exploration of language as an embodied and situated system. My primary areas of focus are (i) multimodal pragmatics; (ii) metaphor in social issues; and (iii) non-canonical syntactic constructions in English. My core principle as a researcher is to be "theory-open" and I strive to incorporate the insights of multiple approaches in all of the work I do. 

I received my PhD from the department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley in December 2022 under the supervision of Eve Sweetser and Line Mikkelsen. My dissertation, The Shape of Discourse: How gesture structures conversation, explores the interface between interactive gesture and formal models of discourse structure. It is available in full here.

Prior to beginning my graduate education at Berkeley, I completed my MA in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh under the fantastic guidance of Rob Truswell.


Contact me at: s.m.laparle@tilburguniversity.edu