Heike Pichler is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is author of The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation (2013) and has published in English Language and Linguistics, the Journal of Sociolinguistics and Intercultural Pragmatics. She is the founder of the Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC) conference series which serves to provide a forum for exploring methodological, empirical and theoretical advancements in the quantitative, variationist analysis of discourse-pragmatic features, and she is also Chair of the DiPVaC research network (www.dipvac.org).