Current research
- My current areas of research lie at the interface between linguistics, (cognitive) pragmatics, argumentation theory and cognitive psychology. I am interested in the relationship between language and beliefs more generally, which is the reason why I have conducted research on deception. Right now I am pursuing this line of research by looking at fallacious arguments, trying to investigate their cognitive underpinnings, in an attempt to bridge the gap between cognitive psychological approaches, which are not traditionally concerned with linguistic realisations of reasoning, and argumentation theory, which does not typically follow a cognitive path of investigation.
PhD Thesis
- Pragmatics of uncooperative and manipulative communication (defended 13 December 2010), under the supervision of prof. Louis de Saussure (University of Neuchâtel). Examined by prof. Didier Maillat (University of Fribourg), prof. Frans van Eemeren (University of Amsterdam), prof. Paul Chilton (University of Lancaster), prof. Fabrice Clément (University of Neuchâtel).
- The topic of the thesis is uncooperative and manipulative communication, which I approached from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective; underlying my research was the central assumption that manipulation is one form of exploiting cognitive biases, errors in reasoning and naturally fallible mechanisms of information processing.
- Uncooperative communication and manipulation
- The cognitive psychology - linguistic interface
- Relevance Theory
- Argumentation Theory and fallacies
- Discourse Analysis
- Semantics and Pragmatics
- The notion of commitment in Linguistics and Pragmatics