Acknowledgements

I am indebted to so many people for the help and support I received while working on this project. First off, I would like to thank everyone who dined with me as well as the servers and restaurants who happily took part in this study. This project would not have been possible without their openness and support. My thanks also go out to Andreas H. Jucker for his enduring support, encouragement and all of his inspiring comments and questions over the past several years, all of which contributed greatly to my ability to complete this study in a more coherent way than I ever imagined. I’d also like to thank Daniel Schreier and the rest of the English Department at the University of Zurich for their thought provoking comments, questions and discussions after presentations and during our many 2nd floor coffee breaks.

A special thanks also goes out to Daniela Landert and Lena Zipp for reading multiple chapters of this manuscript before I submitted it, and to Klaus P. Schneider and the Bonn Applied English Linguistics Department, who welcomed me at their BAEL conference series from the final year of my MA to the final year of my PhD. I’m also grateful to be able to thank Anita Fetzer, Sali Tagliamonte and Heike Pichler for attending my presentations at conferences and providing a wealth of support. Without the stimulating academic environment that I’ve been blessed with, I would have had little to write about. I would also like to thank Anita Fetzer, editor of the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, and Isja Conen, at John Benjamins, for their assistance in the publication process.

Even if I tried, I could not thank my family enough for all their support for listening to my excitement and worries over the most minuscule things related to this study, and especially my mom, who has gone way beyond her “duties” as a mother and read nearly every draft of this manuscript. I would also like to thank my brother, Trent, who let me stay with him in LA and helped me coordinate so many of the logistics during my research stays. Last but not least, I thank the girls from Rüderclub Zürich who kept me balanced over the course of this project and Alexander Schorno whose encouragement and patience taught me to trust myself and take things one stroke at a time even when I could not see the finish line.