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.