Tatjana Juliana Shannon Schnellinger is a PhD candidate in the Language and Linguistics program at NTNU’s Department of Language and Literature. Her research focuses on contact languages, pragmatic variation, multilingualism, and gesture studies. She is supervised by Prof. Susanne Mohr (NTNU) and Prof. Susanne Mühleisen (University of Bayreuth). Education: She holds a BA and MA in English Studies, African Studies, and Egyptology from the University of Cologne. She has worked as a research assistant in the CRC 1252 project on Tima’s split ergativity and as a live speaker at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. PhD Project: Her dissertation examines how language and culture interact in Afro-Surinamese communities, focusing on gesture-speech synchronizations in impolite discourse. Key topics include the Cut-Eye gesture and the Kiss-teeth pragmatic marker. Methodologies include ethnography, elicitation tasks, and video analysis. Outreach: She co-presented at conferences such as ‘Sustainable linguistics: theories and methods’ (2023) and ‘Poetics and Linguistics Association conference’ (2024). She is an associated member of the SOCIAL and SCRUTINY projects. Labs/Teams: Collaborations include the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1252 and participation in the ‘Sustainable cruise tourism in Norway (SCRUTINY)’ project.







