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Inaugural Lecture by Professor Taleghani-Nikazm

Professor Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm at Ohio State

This Lecture has been postponed. New date will be announced as soon as information becomes available.

You are cordially invited

to the Inaugural Lecture by Professor Taleghani-Nikazm

Grammar at work: The interplay between language and social interaction

Traditionally, grammar has been viewed as a cognitive system of rules governing the morphosyntax of a given language. In my talk, I discuss a different view of grammar, one informed by research in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. In these fields, grammar is viewed as an organized system that is dynamic, context-dependent, and emergent in the moment-by-moment unfolding of social interaction. Focusing on practices which speakers use to get others to do things (e.g., requesting, prompting, etc.), I demonstrate how grammar is shaped by interaction.  I do this by examining the interplay between linguistic structure (e.g., an imperative versus a declarative), prosodic features (e.g., stress, pitch), and embodied resources (e.g., gaze, body posture, gesture), as well as their relative and temporal position within conversation. In the second part of my talk, I discuss the implications of the findings of this line of research for second language studies, in particular, for analyzing learners’ language use in interaction and for language teacher training.