Prof. Dr. Lorenza Mondada

University of Lyon
Romance Linguistics

External Senior Fellow (FRIAS School of Language & Literature)
October 2009 – September 2010

Last Update: 31.08.2010

Curriculum Vitae

I was born on the shores of Lago Maggiore, in Ticino, the Italian-speaking, southern part of Switzerland, in 1963.

After studying at the University of Fribourg (1982-1986), I worked as a teaching and research assistant at the universities of Lausanne, Fribourg and Neuchâtel. I spent a year in Paris at EHESS (1991-1992) and I completed my PhD in January 1994 (Univ. of Lausanne). In my PhD I investigate the description of space in travelogues. This led to my interest in practices of space formulation in spoken language and talk, as I increasingly became involved in researching naturally occurring recorded social interactions.

In 1996, I spent a sabbatical semester in the Anthropology Department at the University of California Berkeley. From 1996 to 2001, I was appointed Assistant Orofessor at the University of Basel, where I obtained my Habilitation in 2000. While there, I directed a research project on the interactional production of knowledge in plurilingual research teams, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and data collection in various scientific and medical departments. During this time, I became interested in talk at work and in workplace practices, as well as in the ways in which grammar is both a resource for interaction and emerges within its sequential organization.

In 2001 I was awarded the National Latsis Prize – a prize awarded annually in Switzerland to the top researcher under 40.

I moved to Lyon in 2001 to take up a position as Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Lyon 2. In January 2007, I was appointed Director of the ICAR Research Lab (a unit supported by CNRS, University of Lyon 2, Ecole Nationale Supérieure Lettre et Sciences Humaines, INRP). In Lyon, I have developed analyses of the linguistic and multimodal resources for the sequential organization of interaction, along with new projects on talk at work.

Over the years, I have had the occasion to spend fruitful research periods at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (1996, 2001, 2006), Universität Bielefeld (1999-2000), Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia Mexico (2003), King’s College London (2004), Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Autonoma Barcelona (2004, 2006), Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen (2005), and Helsingin Yliopisto (2006).

Selected Publications

in press: The embodied and negotiated production of assessments in instructed actions. Research on Language and Social Interaction
2009: The methodical organization of talking and eating: assessments in dinner conversations. Food Quality and Preference. DOI : 10.1016/j.foodqual.2009.03.006
2009: Emergent focused interactions in public places: A systematic analysis of the multimodal achievement of a common interactional space. Journal of Pragmatics. 41, 1977-1997
2009: Video recording practices and the reflexive constitution of the interactional order: some systematic uses of the split-screen technique, Human Studies, 32, 1, 67-99.
2008: Doing video for a sequential and multimodal analysis of social interaction: Videotaping institutional telephone. calls. FQS (Forum : Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum : Qualitative Social Research) (www.qualitative-research.net/) 9 (3).
2008: Gülich, E., Mondada, L., Konversationsanalyse. Eine Einführung am Beispiel des Französischen. Tübingen : Niemeyer, 150 p.
2007: Transcript variations and the indexicality of transcribing practices. Discourse Studies, 9/6, 809-821.
2007: Multimodal resources for turn-taking: Pointing and the emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Studies, 9 :2, 195-226. [reprinted in Dijk, T. van (ed.). Discourse Studies, London : Sage, vol. IV, 126-157].
2007: Operating together through videoconference : Members’ procedures for accomplishing a common space of action. In : Hester, S., Francis, D. (eds). Orders of Ordinary Action. Aldershot : Ashgate, 51-67.
2007: Bilingualism and the analysis of talk at work : Code-switching as a resource for the organization of action and interaction. In : Heller, M. (ed). Bilingualism : A Social Approach, New York: Palgrave, 297-318.
2007: Interaktionsraum und Koordinierung. In Schmitt, R. (ed). Koordination. Analysen zur multimodalen Interaktion. Tübingen: Narr, 55-94.
2007: Turn Taking in multimodalen und multiaktionalen Kontexten. In H. Hausendorf (ed). Gespräch als Prozess. Tübingen : Narr, 237-276.
2006: Participants’ online analysis and multimodal practices: projecting the end of the turn and the closing of the sequence. Discourse Studies, 8, 117-129.
2006: Video Recording as the Preservation of Fundamental Features for Analysis, in Knoblauch, H., et alii. (eds). Video Analysis, Bern : Lang, 51-68.
2005: BEcomING COLLECTIVE : The constitution of the audience as an interactional process. in : Latour, B., Weibel, P. (eds). Makings Things Public. Athmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge : MIT Press. 876-883.
2005: Chercheurs en interaction. Comment émergent les savoirs. Lausanne : Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 144 p.
2004: Ways of ‘Doing Being Plurilingual’ In International Work Meetings. In Gardner, R., Wagner, J. (eds). Second Language Conversations, London : Continuum, 27-60.

FRIAS Project

Situating language in time and in the body: systematic and contingent organization of talk in interaction

This project aims at investigating language as being situated within embodied social interactional practices. Based on the study of naturally occurring talk in interaction, it aims at describing the way in which linguistic resources are mobilized, along with multimodal resources, within the organization of social interactions as they are observable in various cultural and institutional settings.

The project is inspired by and aims at contributing to a series of recent research explorations on the relations between language, its use in context, and the body. Various research perspectives, in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology (see the seminal work of Kendon, 1990, McNeill, 1992, Goodwin, 1981, 2000) have shown that the autonomy of language from its situated and embodied uses is a theoretical artefact and that, on the contrary, langage, cognition and bodily practices are deeply interwoven and mutually organized.

This project develops this perspective by anchoring it on detailed analysis of uses of langage in social interactions, studied within the framework of Conversation Analysis – by exploring different levels of its organization (at the level of turns at talk, of sequences and of broader activities). This exploration opens up the possibility of a theoretical reconsideration of the multimodal dimension of language (its articulation with gestures, gazes, bodily positions, body movements, objects manipulations) and of the temporal dimension of language (the temporality of the display and trajectories of gestures and utterances in talk, as well as the temporality of their coordinated and synchronized simultaneities in interaction).