Language, Culture and Cognition

The basis for the research group is that languages are embedded in cultural processes of distributed cognition and must be explained and described with reference to extra-linguistic factors, including values ​​and social norms, culture-specific habits and standards, tools and technologies, knowledge of the world and practical, non-linguistic and pre-linguistic experience and abilities.

The assumption that governs the group's work is that it is, nevertheless, possible to uncover systems and patterns that perform more or less general tasks and functions, and organize the individual, situated language use.

Studies of languages embedded in cultural processes of distributed cognition are studies of language in natural settings rather than in laboratories. To understand a culture and describe the language embedded in it, the analyst must take a perspective that is compatible with the participants' perspective. The group's studies include a variety of methods, but a combination of ethnographic methods and other methods is considered conducive to informative and accurate descriptions systems and patterns and the tasks and functions they perform.

Within this overall framework, the focuses of the group are:

Courtroom interaction

Ecological pragmatics

Forensic Linguistics

Grammar

Information structure

Interaction analysis

Intercultural pragmatics

Linguistic ethnography

Multilingualism

Postcolonial Linguistics

Sociolinguistics

Sociophonetics

Translation studies

Text analysis

Text linguistics