Team

I'm a linguist and teach linguistics, pragmatics and second language learning at USI Università della Svizzera italiana. I'm originally from Basle and graduated at my hometown university, where I also obtained my PhD and the venia legendi in Romance linguistics. I spent three years in Turin as a research fellow before settling in Ticino with my family in 2007. I'm fascinated by all aspects of language, especially by how it is used in dialogue. In early research, I dealt with topics related to multilingualism, studying form example how multilingual speakers tell their life stories and talk about their relationship to languages, or how scholars interact in cross-border research groups. In subsequent works, I investigated the uses of the conditional form in spoken French and Italian, the discourse marker allora, argumentation in the economic press and in online reviews and forums, and textbooks for Italian as a foreign language produced in Switzerland. More recently, I became interested in linguistic means that indicate a statement's information sources. To investigate these, I started a research project in 2020 within which the TIGR corpus of spoken Italian was gathered. The collected recordings and transcripts contain rich information that may be useful to investigate other topics as well and that's why the current follow-up project was set up, which aims at making those materials available to a wider group of researchers.

Personal details

I am Elena Battaglia, and I specialise in spoken Italian linguistics. I graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan and in Language Sciences at the University of Lille. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Linguistics at the Università della Svizzera italiana. I have taught Linguistics at the University of Lille and had a research stay at KU Leuven.

In my research, I am interested in how speakers use grammar and other resources to construct and co-construct their epistemic positioning in spoken interaction. In my doctoral thesis titled "Evidentiality and Interaction in Italian", based on data from the TIGR corpus, I analyse the different types of linguistic constructions that speakers use to communicate their sources of information, and show how such sources are negotiated with other participants.

During my doctorate, I collaborated in the collection and transcription of the TIGR corpus within the InfinIta project. I met local people who participated in our enterprise and experienced linguistic fieldwork: the ShareTIGR project is an opportunity to share this expertise with other scholars and anyone interested in Italian language spoken in Switzerland.

Personal details

Since my early studies, I discovered an interest in language and its daily use, as a tool for exchange, interaction, and sociality. In particular – with an anthropological and sociolinguistic perspective – I am intrigued by the way we influence linguistic systems and linguistic systems influence us, as interdependent beings. In my daily life and work, I am particularly committed to the inclusion of all, paying attention to health, reduction of inequalities, and harmony with Nature.

Currently, I am working as Teaching Assistant-PhD Student at USI, within the FNS project (no. 100012_192771) "The categorization of information sources in face-to-face interaction: a study based on the TIGR-corpus of spoken Italian". In my research, I focus on the epistemic dimension of conversation, on the embodied and multimodal nature of expression, and on phenomena of repair and reformulation in spoken language.

Furthermore, since 2022, I have been a Subject Expert in Glottology and Linguistics (L-LIN/01) at the Department of Humanities of the University of Eastern Piedmont, and since 2020, I have been an active member of the editorial team of the journal Folia Linguistica Historica (category A – ANVUR). I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Humanities at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Vercelli), and subsequently, at the same university, I obtained a Master's degree in Modern, Classical and Comparative Philology in 2019.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0557-8181 
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christian-Geddo    

 

I am interested in the overlap of language and culture that becomes visible in natural (everyday) interactions. I obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Munster (Germany) in German Studies and Anthropology with a thesis on the form and functionality of emojis in WhatsApp messages. I continued my education with a master in Intercultural German Studies, a joint degree program of the Universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Waterloo (Canada). It included a study period in Canada during which I increasingly focused on conversation analytic topics that can be investigated using corpus data. I am currently working as a research assistant for the project “Data-sharing skills in corpus-based research on talk-in-interaction” which investigates the conditions that must be fulfilled in order to prepare and treat audio-video recorded and transcribed corpora of spoken language in interaction as meaningful Open Research Data (ORD). Contributing to the ShareTIGR project means that I can synergistically put into practice my knowledge of the particularities of multimodal spoken language data and the challenges of processing and sharing them. Making research data available to a broad (scientific) public is a promising and progressive development to which I am eager to contribute by sharing TIGR, a valuable resource to study spoken Italian in Switzerland.