Jurgen Esser, born 1947, holds the Chair of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bonn. He studied English Linguistics, General Linguistics and Phonetics at the Universities of Cologne and Freiburg im Breisgau and taught at the Universities of Dundee, Duisburg, Erlangen, Aachen and Bonn. His main research areas are intonation, spoken English, stylistics, word-order, media and presentation structures.