Generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini have rapidly become part of everyday communication. My research examines how people interact linguistically with generative AI, drawing on pragmatics, discourse analysis, and corpus-linguistic methods. The focus is on the language of human prompts, AI-generated responses, and the structure of the resulting Human–AI interaction. Central questions include how identities are constructed in interaction, how relational work is accomplished, and how users orient to the AI as an interactional partner.
The project AI-dentities: Speaking and Relating to AI investigates Human–AI interaction through a combination of qualitative discourse analysis, corpus-assisted methods, and experimental pragmatics. It builds on user-donated ChatGPT interaction data and on systematically designed interactional tasks developed in teaching and research contexts. The project is motivated by the observation that, despite growing interest in AI-generated language, interaction with generative AI remains largely unexplored from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective.
A core component of the project is a series of focused case studies on interactionally salient speech acts in Human–AI interaction. These studies address recurrent practices, such as expressing gratitude, advice seeking and explanation, with the goal of developing a theoretically grounded account of pragmatic norms and interactional patterns in Human–AI communication.
With “Screen-to-text”, I offer a multi-perspective exploration of meaning-making through textual discourses that are directly informed by and oriented towards telecinematic artefacts, i.e. fictional films and television series. This includes interlingual and intralingual subtitles as a site of meaning for viewers, written comments from the perspective of fans, and transcription by scholars. The different screen-to-text discourses I explore share that they centre around a process of intersemiotic transfer from multimodal telecinematic discourse with spoken dialogue at its linguistic centre to a genre of written text that contributes to the individual and/or collaborative negotiation of meaning: The linguistic researcher employs transcription to highlight aspects of scholarly interest and make tangible the multimodal context in which conversation in film and television takes place; the subtitler translates meaning for a new target audience; the commenter contributes to collaborative negotiation of meaning by and for an international fan community.
Co-investigator: Prof. Dr. Miriam Locher (University of Basel, Switzetland).
The CMV project employs qualitative and corpus pragmatic methods to explore linguistic persuasion on the subreddit r/ChangeMyView. The data is constituted by a large corpus of submissions and comments annotated with emic community measures for persuasiveness. The initial stage of our research consists of several case studies that explore different linguistic variables within a "persuasive" corpus of interest and a "non-persuasive" reference corpus. Among other aspects, we have investigated register difference (aspects of formality), conversational moves, politeness.
Co-investigator: Dr. Daria Dayter (Tampere University, Finland).
Forschungslogiken is a German term that combines epistemologies, research context, approaches and research questions of different disciplines. Based on this notion and the entailed awareness for our own and others’ – emic and etic – perspectives, we analyse evaluation in German-language online lay book reviews. We approach these evaluative practices from three perspectives, (1) Close-reading/heuristics/qualitative; (2) Corpus linguistics; (3) Machine learning/sentiment analysis, in order to reflect on the impact of theoretical assumptions and empirical methodologies on research questions, results and interpretation.
Pragmatics of telecinematic discourses: Informed by my work film and television discourses and more recently on subtitled, commented and transcribed artefacts, I keep working on various pragmatic aspects of telecinematic fiction.
Pragmatics of humour: From an initial focus on the role repetition plays in humour and in TV sitcoms in particular, I have broadened my interest to include other settings for humour, in particular text-based computer-mediated communication and also continue working on telecinematic humour.
corpus linguistics, computational linguistics
pragmatics, English linguistics
discourse analysis, conversation analysis
audiovisual translation, subtitling
textual Digital Humanities, social reading
human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, virtual assistants
telecinematic discourse, the pragmatics of fiction, participation structures, stylistics
humour studies, incongruity-resolution, repetition in humour, humour in telecinematic discourse
geolinguistics, linguistic landscapes and spaces
political speech, persuasion online
linguistics of food