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My research interests focus on language as it is used in everyday conversation.  My journal articles and book chapters explore particular grammatical and/or prosodic practices in American English conversation, with special focus on the mutually-shaping relationship between language and interaction.  One of the main themes of my work is the emergent, embodied and sequentially-situated nature of grammar.  This theme is taken up in my (co)-edited and (co)-authored books, Discourse Structure and Anaphora (1987), Voice (1994),Studies in Anaphora (1996), The Language of Turn and Sequence (2002), and Grammar in Everyday Talk (2015), as well as in several articles.  My work often uses tools, methods and concepts from conversation analysis in the pursuit of a deeper understanding of grammatical practices.

This work reconceptualizes linguistic “structure” as emergent, arising from moment-by-moment practices that are sensitive to action and sequence, and interactionally shared.  It also moves towards a view of grammar that is based in the fully embodied production of talk, including sound (phonetics), gesture, and bodily movements.  Grammar is thus treated in this work as encompassing several complex semiotic systems which emerge in situated concerted action among co-present participants in a socially-constructed environment.

I have been working on several projects over the last few years, including an exploration of the syntax of requests at local businesses, an examination of responsive actions, and a cross-linguistic study of the syntax of self-repair.