Conversational Discourse

This research theme focuses on understanding conversational discourse through cognitive models of mental representations and attention, emphasizing context as a mental construct rather than just external environment. It explores how participants’ intentions, knowledge, and situational awareness dynamically shape discourse coherence, relevance, and style, providing a deeper explanatory framework beyond purely linguistic or autonomous text analysis. This matters because it enables more precise modeling of interactional nuances such as interruptions, coherence, and the negotiation of meaning in multi-party discourse.

This theme addresses how interaction unfolds in synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication (SCMC), where traditional turn-taking is challenged. It investigates how conversational floors emerge and are managed without typical vocal and nonverbal cues, emphasizing the interplay between technological affordances and sociolinguistic strategies to maintain coherence and participant coordination. This understanding is vital for designing effective virtual communication platforms and supporting language learning online.

This research line investigates the micro-level units of conversation termed 'dialogue moves', conceptualized as minimal units embodying communicative intentions that interlocutors co-construct in pursuit of joint dialogical goals. Focusing on how these moves combine and evolve within normative dialogue types elucidates the dynamic and often non-uniform nature of actual conversational interactions and helps bridge top-down global goals with bottom-up move functions. Insights from this research enhance computational dialogue systems and discourse analysis.

This theme explores how speakers in cross-dialectal interactions adjust or resist adjustments in both verbal and embodied communication modes to achieve or signal convergence or divergence. It highlights the multimodal nature of accommodation and its connection to social identities, group memberships, and intergroup dynamics. These findings are crucial for understanding linguistic behavior in multilingual settings and designing intercultural communication support.

This theme examines the influence of age, gender, and social context on the deployment of discourse markers (e.g., 'you know', 'bai') and pronouns in casual conversation. It reveals how these linguistic features encode pragmatic functions like floor management, shared knowledge, and emotional involvement, contributing to interpersonal dynamics and identity articulation.

This research investigates advice as a complex, socially situated speech act involving sequences of advising and response, with varying degrees of deontic and epistemic authority. It integrates qualitative and quantitative corpus approaches to reveal how discourse context, speaker roles, and construction types influence the uptake or resistance to advice in spontaneous interactions.