Research in Language and Communication

The linguistic research at Linköping University is conducted in close collaboration between five research environments. The main research fields are Language and interaction and Language and communication history.

A central environment is the Graduate School in Language and Culture in Europe, a multi and interdisciplinary environment that integrates research in the subjects of general linguistics, English, phonetics, French, Literature, Spanish, Swedish and German. In the graduate school, research is carried out in and on English, French, Spanish, Swedish and German. The research has also involved Ancient Greek, Latin, Latvian, Dutch, Romany and Welsh. The graduate school is also an environment in which linguists and literary scholars, both general and specialized, meet and interact.

In Language and interaction, conversation research is a strong area and this research is well known and centrally located within the international field, Interactional Linguistics. It is also characterized by linguistic diversity and a comparable perspective. Conversations of various kinds in English, French, Swedish, German and Welsh are part of the empirical material. There are three main sub-divisions within this research:

1. language theory, reconceptualization of the nature of language based on a dialogical and dynamic perspective
2. language, learning and memory, empirical studies of situated language learning
3. language and communicative disabilities, empirical studies of how functional conversation is achieved when such barriers exist.

Research is conducted in cooperation with several other environments, such as the computer linguistic environment at the Department of Computer Science, whose research on expert systems and translation has a clear interactive perspective. As for the language, learning and memory, there is a long-established collaboration with the research at Child Studies. In the field of language and communicative disabilities, we collaborate with the research environment Logopedics at the Medical Faculty and the Swedish Institute for Disability Research.

The research field of Language and communication history has been developed in close collaboration with an international, especially German-language, tradition of language-based cultural analysis. It shares the interactional linguistics' point of departure in interaction and communication and studies how these are changed over time and how it interacts with language changes. This field too is characterized by linguistic diversity and a comparative perspective. Interaction with Literature is very clear here, themed in areas such as cultural meetings, translation and cultural memory.