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Project

A corpus-based study of the mechanisms of conversational alignment in professional French-speaking context

This PhD project aims at studying the linguistic devices used to achieve conversational alignment, that is, mutual understanding and interactional success between interlocutors, in the context of workplace interactions, in particular business meetings, in French. Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of existing audio corpora, the PhD candidate will focus on a selection of mechanisms that express speakers’ alignment and affiliation, such as other-repetitions, feedback signals, discourse markers, lexical and syntactic alignment, and possibly others. In doing so, the project will adopt an innovative psycholinguistic approach to a genre that has primarily been studied from a pragmatic viewpoint. It will further address a gap in alignment and business discourse research in French, at the intersection between corpus linguistics, Conversation Analysis and business communication research.

Date:1 Apr 2022 →  Today
Keywords:French, alignment, corpus, meetings, business communication
Disciplines:Discourse studies, French language, Sociolinguistics, Corpus linguistics, Pragmatics