Research Interests
- Interactional Linguistics, Multimodal Analysis of Video Corpora, Multi-Level Annotation
- Applied Linguistics, Sensoriality, Learning Practices and Digital Resources
- Sociolinguistics, Fieldwork Methods and Research Valorisation
Professional Profile
I am a linguist working on naturally occurring interactions in Romance languages, especially French and Italian, with a major focus on multimodal analysis of video data.
In recent years, I have been working on the accessibility of public cultural venues (i.e., museums) for people with sensory disabilities, especially visual impairments. Another project involves digital games in public places, as part of intergenerational interactions (grandparents, parents with their children).
Currently, I am Associate Professor in Linguistics (Maître de Conférences en Sciences du Langage) at the University of Orléans and a member of Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique. I am also a Research Fellow (chercheur associé) at the ICAR Lab – École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France).
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ASLAN Laboratory of Excellence (Advanced Studies on Language Complexity) in Lyon, within the BODEGA project. This project aims to study the influence of embodiment on participants’ social behaviours and engagement in a collaborative game designed to measure and develop soft skills.
In 2019-2020, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ATILF Lab – University of Lorraine (France), working on video-corpora for didactic purposes within the FLEURON project (French as a Foreign Language at University: Digital Resources and Tools).
I worked on the ANR/DFG project « SegCor: Segmentation of Oral Corpora » [2017-2019]. The aim of this project is to develop a method of segmentation for oral/interactional language data that is adequate for the analyses of data from talk-in-interaction at different levels (prosody, chunking, syntax, macrosyntax) and for various communities of researchers. The development of a method of segmentation for interactional units (i.e. Turn-Constructional Units) was the focus of my research activity as a Visiting Researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Pragmatics Department) in Mannheim [2019].
I obtained my PhD in Linguistics at the Lumière University Lyon 2 in 2016, under the supervision of Véronique Traverso and Sandra Teston-Bonnard. My PhD project was funded by the ASLAN Laboratory of Excellence. From a perspective relying on interactional linguistics and Aix macrosyntax, I carried out a mixed analysis in order to study both sequential and syntactic characterisations of initiative and reactive actions in sequences involving rejection.
In 2015-2016 and 2020-2021, I was a Lecturer and Research Assistant (Attaché Temporaire d’Enseignement et de Recherche) in French Linguistics at Aix-Marseille University, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and a member of the Laboratoire Parole et Langage. I have been a Research Engineer at the ICAR Lab (CNRS), working on database processing and analysis [2016].
I taught Pragmatics, Corpus Linguistics, Interactional Linguistics, Syntax and Sociolinguistics at the Lumière University Lyon 2 from 2012 to 2019. More recently, I taught Syntax & Pragmatics at the University of Basel and gave seminars on Interactional Linguistics at the University of Lorraine in Nancy [2019-2020], as a Lecturer (Chargé de cours).
Current Direction of Research Projects
October 2022 / October 2024
Co-direction of the MarDisCo project (Discourse markers in French and Italian talk-in-interaction: comparative and applied studies) [with Heike Baldauf, funding: LabEx ASLAN]
The MarDisCo project intends to study the conversational uses of discourse markers and interjections of French and Italian talk-in-interaction. Based on interactional and applied linguistics, this project aims to produce original studies in conversation analysis and to contribute to the field of the exploitation of spoken corpora, by proposing methods and tools for the design of foreign language teaching resources.
Research Projects
September 2021 / August 2022 Postdoctoral Researcher within the project BODEGA
The BODEGA project aims to study the influence of embodiment on participants’ social behaviours and engagement in a collaborative game designed to measure and develop soft skills. By comparing four interaction situations varying in terms of exchange (chat, voice only, webcam) as well as the face-to-face / at distance aspect, we will observe the effects on the participants’ engagement and on the interactional alignment processes in the interactions produced.
May 2019 / August 2020 Postdoctoral Researcher within the project FLEURON (Français Langue Étrangère Ressources et Outils Numériques)
The FLEURON website offers authentic multimedia resources illustrating a range of students’ real-life situations in France. Video recordings make it possible to observe various situations in academic and ordinary contexts, as well as exchanges on several topics. These resources allow foreign students to discover the situations they will face when arrived at a French university. Each document is accompanied by subtitles that provide a time-aligned transcription of what is being said, a complete transcript of the entire recording, tips on using the document to learn to understand/to say, a glossary explaining specific terms. To develop the learning competence and the ability of observing language among FLE learners, a dedicated tool is available: the concordancer.
Within this project, I am in charge of feeding the database with new video-recordings, setting up and documenting users’ experiences with students of French as a foreign language, qualitative interactional analyses based on these experiences, as well as the development of tutorials on resources and tools.
December 2018 / March 2019 Postdoctoral Researcher within the project INTERVALLE (Les INTERactions et leur VALorisation pour une Linguistique appliquée à l’Enseignement)
The Intervalle project will bring the results of previous research in the field of interaction analysis carried out in the LIS team (formerly led by Véronique Traverso) at the ICAR Lab into resources for teaching of French linguistics and French as a foreign language by using extracts of spoken corpora (transcribed, contextualized and didactically apprehended), as well as multimedia fact sheets describing some of the specificities
of spoken French. This project is situated across the disciplines of interactional linguistics appied linguistics, and education; it will help teach the interaction skills that are essential for mastering a spoken language and will benefit from the network of language teachers and experts coordinated by ICAR-LIS.
Within this project, my responsability concerns the development of a multi-level annotation of extracts from the CLAPI FLE database. This annotation incorporates different perspectives, interactional phenomena (such as repairs, repetitions, formulations, etc.) as well as technical lexicon, discourse markers, syntactic configurations of spoken language and specific multimodal resources. The tagging will address the recurring need for teachers to have a support for teaching of interactional competence and may potentially be used by learners.
2016 / 2019 ANR/DFG Researcher within the SegCor – Segmentation of Oral Corpora project (ANR-15-FRAL-0004, coordinators: Thomas Schmidt, IDS Mannheim and Véronique Traverso, ICAR – ENS de Lyon).
The project will develop a method of segmentation for oral/interactional language data that is adequate for the analyses of data from talk-in-interaction at different levels (prosody, chunking, syntax, macrosyntax) and for various communities of researchers. It is based on three large collections of French and German audio and video recordings of various interaction types (the databases CLAPI, ESLO and FOLK, respectively), as well as approaches to segmentation put forward in the literature on conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics, as its starting point. The project is the first approach to segmentation that is both based on comprehensive data treatment of a sufficiently large and diverse empirical basis and takes into account the cross-linguistic dimension.
I am currently a member of the research teams working on (macro)syntactic, interactional and prosodic units.
2017 / 2019 Participation in the ITAC Project – Interactions inTergénérationnelles Avec éCrans (project leaders : Christine Develotte, ICAR – ENS de Lyon / IFÉ and Mabrouka El Hachani, ELICO, Lyon 3).
The ITAC project is a scientific collaboration between the ICAR and the ELICO research teams, Lyon’s Public Library (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon), and Lyon 3 University. Its aim is to study the intergenerational use of digital artefact at the BML. ITAC will focus on the relational, linguistic and educative aspects derived from the interactions and how these are mediated by professionals. This research will be based on the conversational analysis framework and communication/education studies.
2015 / 2018 Participation in the project Touching-the-body in interaction (coordinator : Luca Greco, CEMS – EHESS / University of Lorraine).
The international project Touching-the-body in interaction explores the dimension of touch and tactile practices in a variety of ethnographic contexts articulating the study of sensory modalities, interactional multimodal analysis and research on grammar-in-interaction.
I develop a multimodal and interactional study of the unfolding of activities and the way interactants navigate fluctuating participation frameworks in guided visits with visually impaired people.
2012 / 2016 – PhD candidate researcher, ASLAN Laboratory of Excellence
Title of the PhD research project:
Rejection in interaction. Towards a syntactic and sequential approach to negation
Supervisors:
Véronique Traverso (CNRS, ICAR – UMR 5191)
Sandra Teston-Bonnard (Université Lumière Lyon 2, ICAR – UMR 5191)
defended on December 20th 2016 at the Lumière University Lyon 2
Jury:
Arnulf Deppermann (Universität Mannheim, reviewer)
Renata Galatolo (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, member)
Stefan Pfänder (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, reviewer)
Nathalie Rossi-Gensane (Université Lumière Lyon 2, president)
Sandra Teston-Bonnard (Université Lumière Lyon 2, co-supervisor)
Véronique Traverso (CNRS, supervisor)
Abstract:
My research focuses on rejection in conversation, from an interactional linguistic perspective. Rejection is sequentially characterised as a second pair part. This study is based on a collection of instances from naturally occurring video data (ordinary conversations, dinner conversations, interactions in commercial settings, meal preparations, guided tours). I propose a fine-grained transcription of conversational excerpts, taking into account multimodal and verbal resources.
From a perspective relying on interactional linguistics and Aix macrosyntax, I carry out a mixed analysis in order to study both sequential and syntactic characterisations of initiative and reactive actions in sequences involving rejection.
The first part of the study focuses on the rejection of concrete offers dealing with objects, the second part concerns rejections of candidate answers dealing with confirmation requests. My research is grounded in talk-in-interaction and I mobilise two approaches that operate in this field. The multimodal and interactional analysis allows me to highlight sequential patterns, which can also be characterised in macrosyntactic terms. In my data, negation is closely connected to the realisation of rejection: it is considered both through the verbal resources that enable it to be expressed and in its physical manifestations (head shakes, hand gestures, facial expressions).
2013 / 2016 – Participation in the ORFÉO project (Outils et Ressources sur le Français Écrit et Oral, ANR 12-CORP-0005, coordinator: Jeanne-Marie Debaisieux, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3).
I was a member of the research teams on interactional and syntactic annotations.
I participated in the development of an exploration tool for use within an interactional approach to emotion in human interactions. The method is based upon detecting traces of emotionality along eight analytical dimensions: multimodality, interactivity, uttered noises, agreement markers, personal markers, macrosyntactic units, interactional units and lexical repetitions.
2014 / 2015 – Participation in the Petits films project (coordinator: Vanessa Piccoli, with the collaboration of the LIS team and the Complex Corpora Center staff at the ICAR Lab).
A double aim underlies this project: to prepare small films from three different corpora, and to reflect on the procedures, finalities and constraints of this type of production.
The creation of short video clips can represent not only a feedback for the participants, but also a way to promote a corpus of data, a type of approach in linguistics and, more globally, the activity of the research laboratory.