Manuela Schönenberger holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Geneva (The acquisition of verb placement in Swiss German, 1998) and a Habilitation (Parameter setting and transfer effects in language acquisition, 2011) from the University of Oldenburg. In 1994–1995 she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, on a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). After working at various universities in Germany and Cyprus she returned to the University of Geneva. She is currently working in a project on dialect syntax with a focus on syntactic and morphological variation within and across speakers. The project "Syntactic Variation in Swiss German", directed by Eric Haeberli, is funded by the SNSF. Her research interests include syntax (verb placement, Verb Projection Raising, doubly-filled COMPs, and apokoinus) and 1st and 2nd language acquisition (subject-verb agreement, verb movement, article use, and case marking).