Department of Linguistics
Language in Social Life
The Language in Social Life research group formally established in 1994, is located within the Department of Linguistics. Our research is dedicated to the study of language across many social contexts using a variety of theoretical approaches.
Our research experts look at language from the point of view of its place in our everyday life from the the casual interactions with family and friends through to the language of the work place. As part of understanding this complex multimodal interaction, researchers are interested not only in the crafted texts both spoken and written, but also in the seemingly less crafted incidental interactions.
Most importantly, the research group is focused on the issues that concern our community. To do this, the research group has a dual research orientation to:
- building descriptions of living social contexts and the discourse patterns that realise knowledge and interaction in these contexts
- developing theoretical and methodological tools for modelling discourse that are based on extensive, accumulating information about how language functions within and between these living social contexts.
A distinctive feature of the research group's work is the development of computational tools for the analysis and description of natural language corpora. These tools are for both low-level pattern searching, which can be completely automated, and high-level linguistic analysis. Using these tools to study real language data is crucial to the linguistic research practised at the research group.
The research group contributes to the teaching programs in the Department of Linguistics and research group staff and members teach in linguistic programs from first year to PhD supervision.
The research group undertakes consultancy work, including the analysis of contexts of interaction and the development of materials for training manuals and communication tools. The research group is also interested in communicating linguistic research to a general audience.
Latest research Projects
Archives
Some of our previous work are listed below.
Featured Publications
Preprints
Anuual report
Seminars presentations
Contact us
Associate Professor David Butt
Phone: +61 2 9850 8793
Email: david.butt@mq.edu.au
Visit: C5A, Level 5
Find: CLSL members
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Discover our courses and research programs:
- Applied Linguistics & TESOL
- Audiology
- Editing & E-Publishing
- Linguistics
- Speech Pathology
- Translating and Interpreting