Research Interests
My research interests cover four interconnected areas; a) Conversation Analysis (CA: traditional and applied), b) Pragmatics (Politeness Theory and Second Language Pragmatics), c) Sociolinguistics (Dialects, Language Policy, Gender, and Power), and d) Electronic Discourse and Communication (language use and socialization). These four areas explore how humans communicate, intraculturally or interculturally, anywhere and any time, through language, phonic or graphic; while contexts such as gender, age, power of participants, location, and culture, govern how participants produce and interpret messages. My past and future studies were and would be built around these four areas. I see the potential for having my future work published in prestigious journals and attracting external research grants.
a. Conversation Analysis: I have been working extensively on human social interaction, verbal and nonverbal. Turn-taking systems and grammatical features used during turn-at-talk reveal how mutual understandings among participants are established and collaboratively accomplished. I extend my research to cover gestures and eye gaze which are intricately designed to facilitate other’s comprehension and serve communicative functions that words or language structures alone cannot do otherwise.
b. Pragmatics: I focus on ‘face maintenance’ pioneered by Goffman, and later Brown and Levinson. I have come to believe that, theoretically, it is impossible for one, when involved in contact with others, to avoid exercising or maintaining ‘face’ (not only one’s own but also that of other co-participants). Topics of my interest include how participants establish mutual understandings, handle conflicts, solve problems, or reach a final conclusion; the activities where face and face maintenance are in jeopardy. These areas remain under investigation, especially when variables are whether the participants are 1) acquainted with each other, 2) whether they share language and culture, or 3) whether their power and status are equal. The second area has developed my research paradigm to cover pragmatic competence of nonnative speakers, either in a formal setting or everyday encounters.
c. Sociolinguistics: I am interested in language policy in relation to dialects (including regiolect, ethnolect, and sociolect). While standardization process has set an ideal performance or language production for those who have a nonstandard dialect, it separates them from those whose dialect is standard while also giving a prestige to those whose dialect is standard. This has been supported by governments, resulting ultimately in a language that is more powerful, socially acceptable, and widely used than any of its nonstandard dialects. I am seeking to study the effectiveness of status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning in positively changing the attitudes and beliefs of the majority in a society toward a nonstandard dialect.
Power can be found in an asymmetrical relationship among two groups. A good example of an asymmetrical relationship is gender and gendered language; men having more power than women. Instead of looking at their language, patterns of language use, and communication style, I am exploring how other social variables and attributes will change this long-known asymmetrical relationship in some encounters and will allow participants to negotiate it throughout the course of encounters.
d. Electronic Discourse and Communication: Human communication is considered to be both interactional and transactional. In online communication, however, the former is minimized due to the fact that online communication, from the very beginning, was not designed for social purposes but for data retrieval. Nevertheless, language, typed or verbal, is believed to help its users communicate and express their needs and emotions. From a linguistic perspective, these tools and software are designed to imitate communicative codes and intents of their users. As a result, I want to determine how users make use of available tools and software to build their relational and interactional communication, and how successfully these tools and software help them achieve this purpose.
Another area within electronic discourse that intrigues me is comprehension and multimodality. A website usually contains several webpages its owner designs to display ostensibly coherent content. Quite often, there are links that help viewers maneuver around a website. Content displayed on websites is encoded into text, graphics, image, video, or a combination thereof, resulting in different communicative modes and channels within one webpage or a sequence of webpages. This helps users interact with and comprehend the content better.
I also want to see how internet users comprehend content presented in multimodal codes, make use of multimodal codes, interact with them, and connect them in order to facilitate their own comprehension. The content and multimodal codes designed to present the content are what web owners believe to be topically or thematically relevant and should be consumed by internet users in a specific order, but this may be different from what the users think and do. I want to investigate more closely how culture impacts on website design and layout and how content is conveyed by multimodal webpages.
a. Conversation Analysis: I have been working extensively on human social interaction, verbal and nonverbal. Turn-taking systems and grammatical features used during turn-at-talk reveal how mutual understandings among participants are established and collaboratively accomplished. I extend my research to cover gestures and eye gaze which are intricately designed to facilitate other’s comprehension and serve communicative functions that words or language structures alone cannot do otherwise.
b. Pragmatics: I focus on ‘face maintenance’ pioneered by Goffman, and later Brown and Levinson. I have come to believe that, theoretically, it is impossible for one, when involved in contact with others, to avoid exercising or maintaining ‘face’ (not only one’s own but also that of other co-participants). Topics of my interest include how participants establish mutual understandings, handle conflicts, solve problems, or reach a final conclusion; the activities where face and face maintenance are in jeopardy. These areas remain under investigation, especially when variables are whether the participants are 1) acquainted with each other, 2) whether they share language and culture, or 3) whether their power and status are equal. The second area has developed my research paradigm to cover pragmatic competence of nonnative speakers, either in a formal setting or everyday encounters.
c. Sociolinguistics: I am interested in language policy in relation to dialects (including regiolect, ethnolect, and sociolect). While standardization process has set an ideal performance or language production for those who have a nonstandard dialect, it separates them from those whose dialect is standard while also giving a prestige to those whose dialect is standard. This has been supported by governments, resulting ultimately in a language that is more powerful, socially acceptable, and widely used than any of its nonstandard dialects. I am seeking to study the effectiveness of status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning in positively changing the attitudes and beliefs of the majority in a society toward a nonstandard dialect.
Power can be found in an asymmetrical relationship among two groups. A good example of an asymmetrical relationship is gender and gendered language; men having more power than women. Instead of looking at their language, patterns of language use, and communication style, I am exploring how other social variables and attributes will change this long-known asymmetrical relationship in some encounters and will allow participants to negotiate it throughout the course of encounters.
d. Electronic Discourse and Communication: Human communication is considered to be both interactional and transactional. In online communication, however, the former is minimized due to the fact that online communication, from the very beginning, was not designed for social purposes but for data retrieval. Nevertheless, language, typed or verbal, is believed to help its users communicate and express their needs and emotions. From a linguistic perspective, these tools and software are designed to imitate communicative codes and intents of their users. As a result, I want to determine how users make use of available tools and software to build their relational and interactional communication, and how successfully these tools and software help them achieve this purpose.
Another area within electronic discourse that intrigues me is comprehension and multimodality. A website usually contains several webpages its owner designs to display ostensibly coherent content. Quite often, there are links that help viewers maneuver around a website. Content displayed on websites is encoded into text, graphics, image, video, or a combination thereof, resulting in different communicative modes and channels within one webpage or a sequence of webpages. This helps users interact with and comprehend the content better.
I also want to see how internet users comprehend content presented in multimodal codes, make use of multimodal codes, interact with them, and connect them in order to facilitate their own comprehension. The content and multimodal codes designed to present the content are what web owners believe to be topically or thematically relevant and should be consumed by internet users in a specific order, but this may be different from what the users think and do. I want to investigate more closely how culture impacts on website design and layout and how content is conveyed by multimodal webpages.