Discourse analysis

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Discourse analysis

This research area covers a diverse portfolio of projects involving discourse analysis and conversation analysis. We are interested in how language is used strategically to achieve specific goals and how discourses reflect societal change. We study written genres such as sustainability and climate reports, various types of news text and popular science, and oral genres such as business meetings and other instances of workplace interaction, both in physical and digital settings.

Our research often involves electronic corpora, purpose-built as well as publicly available, and the use of search-engine tools.

Those of us who work with conversation analysis investigate naturally occurring talk in intercultural contexts and explore various communication practices of different communities of practice.

More specifically, we undertake research on:
  • corporate communication
  • leadership communication
  • strategic and political communication
  • communication about migration and poverty
  • intercultural communication
  • multilingual and lingua franca interaction

 

DEPARTMENT OF PROFESSIONAL AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Research group members

Ongoing research projects

  • CLIMLIFE

    CLIMLIFE

    The CLIMLIFE project studies how Norwegian citizens relate the challenges of climate
    change to their day-to-day life choices. Recent research shows that, when asked about solutions to tackle climate change, Norwegian citizens generally say “we must all contribute”. However, what does this mean more specifically? How willing are we to change our lifestyle? How do people, in particular young people, relate these challenges to their everyday life choices? We suggest that people use mainly four strategies for integrating, or not, the challenges of climate change into their lives: 1) Activism, 2) Responsiveness, 3) Resignation and 4) Rejection. The CLIMLIFE project studies these questions through a cross-disciplinary collaboration, including researchers from linguistic, media, political and natural sciences.

    CLIMLIFE

  • MIGRATION AND THE MEDIA

    MIGRATION AND THE MEDIA

    MIGRATION AND THE MEDIA is a corpus-based research project which studies how media outlets, particularly newspapers, linguistically frame migrants and migration. The automated retrieval of linguistic features allows for a reliable analysis of semantic and pragmatic properties assigned to migrants across different newspaper articles. One of the main aims of this project is to ascertain whether migrants are presented in a way that influences their process of integration into their host societies.

  • Digital collaboration platforms as learning environments in multilingual business communities

    Digital collaboration platforms as learning environments in multilingual business communities

    DIGITAL COLLABORATION PLATFORMS AS LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN MULTILINGUAL BUSINESS COMMUNITIES

    This conversation analytic research project investigates linguistic and multimodal practices acquired and developed on a digital platform at a multinational IT company, where English is used as a lingua franca. The project provides novel insights into how contemporary multilingual workforce juggles between multiple parallel tasks and online communication channels while acquiring, using and adapting linguistic, discursive and multimodal practices. The project answers a call for a more holistic research approach that takes multilingualism into consideration in second language acquisition studies, while engaging with the entirety of semiotic forms which contribute to meaning-making.

Completed research projects

  • KIAP - CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ACADEMIC PROSE: 2002-2006

    KIAP - CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ACADEMIC PROSE: 2002-2006

    KIAP

    The main research question of the KIAP project was whether cultural identities in academic discourse exist, and if so, to what degree these identities can be linked to discipline or to national language.

    The aim of this project was to describe the genre of the research article with a point of departure in certain linguistic features that may point to similarities and differences between articles written in different languages and within different disciplines.

    The project was doubly comparative, since 450 refereed articles in three different languages (English, French and Norwegian) from three different disciplines (linguistics, economics and medicine) were studied. The project found that both discipline and language had an effect on the frequency of all the six features studied, but for most of them discipline turned out to be more important than language.

    This project was funded by the Research Council of Norway.

  • LINGCLIM

    LINGCLIM

    LINGCLIM (Linguistic Representations of Climate Change Discourse and Their Individual and Collective Interpretations).

    The primary objective is to generate new and integrated knowledge about the role of language in climate discourse through developing an innovative multidisciplinary methodology including an opinion survey and a psychological experiment in addition to comprehensive linguistic and discursive analyses.
    This is a three year project funded by the Research Council of Norway.

    For futher information:

    LINGCLIM

  • POLAME

    POLAME

    POLAME

    Poverty, language and media in Latin America: The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

    POLAME is a multidisciplinary project funded by the Research Council of Norway. It aims to study the linguistic representation of poverty in Argentinean, Brazilian, Colombian and Mexican agenda-setting media in order to uncover how language use reproduces ideologically conditioned views on poverty.
     
    The project will also build a web-searchable taxonomy of the language of poverty.

    For futher information:

    POLAME