BIO
Rebecca Clift is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She studied English literature as an undergraduate at Durham and went on to do a PhD on misunderstandings in conversation at Cambridge. She taught both at the University of Cambridge and at the University of East Anglia before she went to Essex. She was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2002 and is currently visiting research fellow at the University of Huddersfield. Her research interests are in Conversation Analysis, in which she is an internationally renowned scholar. She has published work on the relationship between grammar and interaction, evidentiality, knowledge claims in interaction and reported speech. She is the co-editor, with Elizabeth Holt, of Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and is the author of 'Conversation Analysis' in the Cambridge University Press 'Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics' series. She is currently working on a corpus of video-recorded family arguments. She is a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar in 2024 for her research project, 'Behind Closed Doors: Trajectories to Violence in Intimate Interaction' (https://www.hfg.org/the-harry-frank-guggenheim-foundation-welcomes-its-2024-distinguished-scholars)
Further information:
https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/CLIFT78500/Rebecca-Clift
Action, context and embodiment in interaction: An introduction to Conversation Analysis
This lecture will introduce you to the basic perspectives, principles and methods of Conversation Analysis (CA) to study naturally-occurring interaction. Using both audio and video clips and case studies, it will show how a focus on action and sequences of action, rather than isolated utterances, is fundamental. It will examine how CA understands context by reference to a basic principle of sequential position. This basic principle is deployed in two studies I’ll discuss: one on the eye-roll in interaction, and one on the palm-up gesture. These studies are part of a wider ongoing project I’m currently engaged in, which integrates verbal with non-verbal behaviour, on family arguments.
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Contact
linguistics.research.seminars@gmail.com
PID 070/2024-2025
PID ID2024/088