Online video games have boomed in popularity over the past 20 years. These games have gained steam both in the public eye, and now increasingly in the academic world. While many linguistics scholars have examined the games’ community building aspects, as well as virtual identity building, few have yet to look at the fast-growing professional e-sports (electronic sports) scene. This leisurely activity has evolved into a competitive industry with professional sponsorships, organizations, large prize pools, and expansive fandoms. As such, e-sports is an exciting new site for academic inquiry. Much of esports research lies in the domain of sports psychology, computer science, and team management, but little in the realm of linguistics, and specifically socio-pragmatics. This research project aims to fill the gap in that research.

Looking at the widely popular game League of Legends, this research analyzes the multitude of multimodal semiotic resources at the players disposal. Combining computer mediated communication, gaming, and sports research, I use multimodal discourse analysis to examine how players co-construct team cohesion and manage relational work in game. The data consists of in-game video and audio recordings, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic field notes. I hope to identify and understand moments of failure and success, how players react to and manage these moments while in game, and how the multitude of communicative resources are utilized to accomplish this. I will also use relational work and identity theory to further examine how the players reactions to gameplay and teammates failures or successes reflect larger gaming discourses of toxicity and cooperation. League of Legends in particular is known to be a game rife with negatively marked online behaviors such as flaming and trolling, which are not conducive to team cohesion and bonding. Almost all professional players are recruited from the casual play community and as such are familiar with the toxic community. How these behaviors are managed and overcome when cooperation and sociability becomes crucial to their success is an important question I pose. In looking at the European context as well, with players coming from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, using English as their team language, is an intercultural communicative aspect under inspection. Competitive players juggle voice chat, in game visual signals, as well as their embodied avatars, to coordinate teamwork and relational management. The complicated nature of this communication reflects larger discourses about the evolving melding of online and offline realities.

Interactions in healthcare often determine the quality of patient care, effectiveness of medical information relayed and the positivity of patients’ overall healthcare experience. This is amplified when considering non-verbal patients and patients otherwise in need of mediation. As such, it is important to recognize that interactions in healthcare are not limited to human healthcare – rather, they equally pertain to non-human patients’ needs and welfare. Veterinarians are expected to establish expertise, credibility, and trust with both client and pet. Clients juggle multiple roles, acting as laypeople in veterinary matters, but as experts on and interpreters of the pets’ needs. In veterinarian care, these complex communication strategies involve not just the pet owner and the veterinarian but also the pet itself. Discourse in veterinary care consists not only of the veterinarian’s professional assessment and advice, but also of the pet’s state and medical history, which must be accurately interpreted and communicated by the client.

This transdisciplinary dissertation aims to bridge veterinarian communication studies and sociolinguistics in order to analyze participant interaction in veterinarian-client-animal settings during consultations, with a focus on building ‘expert identities’. The project will use relational work analysis, discursive analysis, and previous findings on expertise, credibility, trust, and advice management in medical discourse from human and veterinarian medical research. The data analyzed will be collected through recordings of authentic consultations in small vet clinics, semi-structured interviews, and televised vet documentaries. Aspects on which the research will focus are distribution of discourse, use of relational work, negotiation of roles, advice management, end-of-life communication, conveying the pet’s needs and advocating for appropriate healthcare. This research aims to fill the gap of relational work research in veterinarian linguistics, specifically with a focus on expert identity positioning, management of expert and credibility strategies, creation of trust, and advice management, and will contribute to the field of expert communication in health.

This project is supported by the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics Scholarship (2024) and the Janggen-Pöhn-Stiftung.

Research on language use and learning during study abroad has primarily investigated students' use of the target language (TL) in a TL environment and the convergence of their TL skills towards a native speaker norm. To date, little is known about the multilingual practices that students engage in while studying abroad. From the perspective of multilingualism, contexts in which a local language is used, of which the students may have little or no previous knowledge, represents a fascinating case as students often heavily depend on English as a lingua franca (ELF) to interact with the host community and other international students. The present study aims to shed light on the role of ELF in mediating the learning of local languages in different ELF contexts. The goal is to investigate the extent to which ELF is employed in the foreign language classroom, by whom, under what circumstances and for what purposes. Additionally, the study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of course instructors' and students' attitudes toward the use of ELF in the foreign language classroom. Previous research on foreign language learning in the classroom has mainly focused on the role of students' first languages and the mobilization of other linguistic resources to enhance the language learning process. While the role of ELF for the English language classroom or the use of ELF as the medium of instruction in non-language courses continue to be discussed and investigated, the role of ELF as a mediating language for teaching and learning a third language remains underexplored (for exceptions, see Ife 2008; Wang 2013; Turnbull 2018). The present study aims to enhance our understanding of the use of ELF in local language courses offered at higher education institutions or language schools and targeted at international students with different linguistic backgrounds. To address the research questions, in a first step, videos of classroom interaction will be recorded, transcribed and analyzed focusing on incidents of ELF use. In a second step, reflexive online-interviews with the course instructors and students will be conducted. Excerpts of the videos will be used to discuss examples of actual ELF use in the classroom.

This PhD is being supervised by Prof. Miriam A. Locher, Prof. Sybille Heinzmann and Prof. Susanne Ehrenreich.

Research on language use and learning during study abroad has primarily investigated students' use of the target language (TL) in a TL environment and the convergence of their TL skills towards a native speaker norm. To date, little is known about the multilingual practices that students engage in while studying abroad. From the perspective of multilingualism, contexts in which a local language is used, of which the students may have little or no previous knowledge, represents a fascinating case as students often heavily depend on English as a lingua franca (ELF) to interact with the host community and other international students. The present study aims to shed light on the role of ELF in mediating the learning of local languages in different ELF contexts. The goal is to investigate the extent to which ELF is employed in the foreign language classroom, by whom, under what circumstances and for what purposes. Additionally, the study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of course instructors' and students' attitudes toward the use of ELF in the foreign language classroom. Previous research on foreign language learning in the classroom has mainly focused on the role of students' first languages and the mobilization of other linguistic resources to enhance the language learning process. While the role of ELF for the English language classroom or the use of ELF as the medium of instruction in non-language courses continue to be discussed and investigated, the role of ELF as a mediating language for teaching and learning a third language remains underexplored (for exceptions, see Ife 2008; Wang 2013; Turnbull 2018). The present study aims to enhance our understanding of the use of ELF in local language courses offered at higher education institutions or language schools and targeted at international students with different linguistic backgrounds. To address the research questions, in a first step, videos of classroom interaction will be recorded, transcribed and analyzed focusing on incidents of ELF use. In a second step, reflexive online-interviews with the course instructors and students will be conducted. Excerpts of the videos will be used to discuss examples of actual ELF use in the classroom.

This PhD is being supervised by Prof. Miriam A. Locher, Prof. Sybille Heinzmann and Prof. Susanne Ehrenreich.

This doctoral dissertation is devoted to the study of the translation of linguistic impoliteness phenomena in fictional texts in English, French and Italian. I join three different research fields: interpersonal pragmatics, the pragmatics of fiction, and translation studies. This project is intended as an extension of my Master's thesis work on the translation into Italian of linguistic politeness stategies in Raymond Carver's short stories. The theoretical concepts I focus on are impoliteness, face-work, power, social distance and conflict negotiation, as well as the relationship between culture and language and the specificity of fictional data with regard to linguistic analysis (style, voice, dialogues, participation structure). I have built a multilingual and parallel corpus of contemporary short stories, written by an equal number of authors for each of the three source languages, and translated into the other two target languages. The unit of analysis within the texts are conflictual scenes. The data are coded and analyzed contrastively, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The aim of this work is threefold: first of all, to apply (im)politeness research on translation and fiction; second, to contribute to the scientific literature on impoliteness opposing English to less studies languages such as French and Italian; finally, and more particularly, to look for patterns of translation in realizing and conveying linguistic impoliteness, thus giving importance to the translation of pragmatic aspects which are deeply rooted in the context and culture of origin.

This PhD is supervised by Prof. Denis Jamet-Coupé and Prof. Miriam A. Locher.

While it has been widely acknowledged in academic and practitioner literature that increasing diversity in IT through inclusion of women is an ongoing priority, recent studies of IT workplaces in Europe and the US have found recurrent themes of gender discrimination cutting across different cultural contexts, including Switzerland and the UK (e.g. Schwab et al., 2020). In software development and project management in these contexts, agile ways of working are increasingly becoming the norm (Meyer, 2014). 'Agile' encompasses a number of practices and processes which put an emphasis on facilitating open and frequent communication, empowering teams, reducing hierarchies and foregrounding interpersonal and relational aspects of professional communication. This, in turn, has been argued to reduce (masculine) power structures (Barke, 2015; Boes et al., 2018), yet the field of IT in Euro-Western contexts remains largely male dominated. Furthermore, counter to the importance of communication to agile ways of working (e.g. Hummel et al., 2015), linguistic research on this phenomenon remains scarce, specifically with regard to gender issues.

The present study thus takes a linguistic approach to agile ways of working in IT by way of an in-depth qualitative case study of different sociocultural contexts, including Switzerland, the UK, and the US. It deploys frameworks from linguistics at the intersection of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and identity construction to investigate agile ways of working through a gender lens. The dissertation draws on multiple data sources including over 52 hours of recordings of team and one-to-one meetings from a UK company, and semi-structured interviews with 22 IT professionals from Switzerland, the UK and the US; to explore the intricate relationship between gender, professional and personal identities at the interface of competing gendered discourses in the field of agile IT. Applying and refining current conceptualizations of gender in workplace discourse, the dissertation differentiates between different gender orders to capture the intricate and manifold processes of the gendering of work both in talk about work, and talk at work. Detailing how gendered practices are enacted and constructed by participants, the project enhances academic understanding of linguistic practices that construct agile IT workplaces as gendered on multiple levels. It thereby contributes to ongoing debates on the gendering of the IT industry specifically, and the gendering of work more globally, which in turn can provide much needed insight into persistent gender inequalities in the field. This PhD was supervised by Prof. Miriam A. Locher and Prof. Stephanie Schnurr.

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032719146

Aim

The project Pragmatics of Fiction: Lay subtitling and online communal viewing offers a new pragmatic perspective onto processes and products of subtitling. Its central foci are the role of English in making televised Korean dramas accessible to a global audience; the changing paradigms of subtitle production and reception towards more participatory and collaborative practices; the dynamic participation structures of translated artefacts and their effects on cross-cultural communication. While the project draws on research in translation, it is grounded in English linguistics, the pragmatics of fiction and computer-mediated communication. Our aim is to bring linguistic questions about language in use to this research interface.

Team

Principal investigators: Miriam A. Locher and Thomas C. Messerli

Student interns for relational work and timed comments:Elizabeth Adams, Carmelo Cudemo, Giogia Egloff, Christian Feige, Vera Geitz, Luca Lavina, Joël Stocker, Clara Vuille-dit-Bille

Timed comments codebook development: Miriam A. Locher and Andrea Wuest

Over the last two decades, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs, where a content subject is taught in an additional language, have become increasingly popular, and Switzerland is no exception. Due to its plurilingual landscape and its decentralized education system, Switzerland offers a particularly diverse context for the study of CLIL, which, compared to other European countries, is not that advanced yet. Therefore, this thesis investigates, in an extensive case study, the linguistic requirements for students and teachers in CLIL (English) and non-CLIL (German) biology lessons at a Swiss upper-secondary school ( Gymnasium ). In a self-collected corpus (EG_BIO corpus) consisting of 31 video-recorded CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons, two particularly relevant aspects are analyzed using a mixed-methods approach: the use of multilingual and -modal resources (translanguaging) and the role of technical terms (technicality) in the classroom. Since biology lessons in Switzerland offer a highly multilingual environment, students' and teachers' L1s (Swiss German/ other L1s), the languages of instruction (German or English), as well as the source languages of technical terms (Greek and Latin) - the present study examines the use and frequency of translanguaging practices in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons. Translanguaging has often been investigated using qualitative measures, therefore the study proposes a model to operationalize translanguaging for quantitative analysis (research focus 1). Since science subjects such as biology are often marked by a high density of technical terms, the study further investigates the complicated relationship between English and German technical vocabulary as used in biology, again by proposing a model to identify and analyze technical terms from various perspectives (research focus 2). Finally, the present study connects the two previous analyses and explores the connection between translanguaging and technicality, and investigates how multilingual and -modal resources are used to negotiate technical terms (research focus 3). Findings show that translanguaging practices and technical terms are used in complex and diverse ways in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons. Translanguaging practices are rare in both CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons, while technical vocabulary makes up roughly a tenth of the classroom discourse. Particularly translanguaging with source languages, a strategy used by one of the teachers to negotiate subject-specific terminology, seems to be a potentially successful pedagogy in science teaching, even more so in CLIL science lessons. Overall, the process-oriented comparative study shows how language and content are closely intertwined at the level of translanguaging and technicality, and thus contributes to a further our understanding how language and content work in integration in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons.

This PhD was supervised by Prof. Miriam A. Locher and Prof. Ana Llinares.