Language, Interaction, and Social Organization

Students interested in discourse, interactional linguistics, and sociocultural linguistics (including sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology) will find the graduate emphasis in Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) a valuable addition to their Ph.D. program. LISO brings together faculty and graduate students in linguistics, sociology, and education who share a recognition of the importance of language as a fundamental resource for human action and social organization. LISO faculty and graduate students conduct research on language use and other communicative action in their naturally occurring interactional contexts. Relying primarily on video and audio recordings of social interaction, linguists in LISO examine such issues as how grammatical structures emerge from communicative needs, how embodied communication such as gesture interacts with language, and how broader social phenomena like identity and power are produced within interaction. Members of LISO study informal conversational interaction in a variety of languages and cultures as well as such institutional contexts as day care centers, classrooms, and the media. LISO participants explore a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that can be brought to bear in working with discourse data, such as conversation analysis, ethnography, corpus linguistics, and other perspectives. The LISO proseminar and the affiliated LISO Research Focus Group host a series of events annually, including data sessions, research presentations by invited outside speakers and by LISO faculty and graduate students, and a student-run conference held each spring, which is organized in alternate years by UCSB and by LISO’s counterpart at UCLA, CLIC. For more information, see the General Catalog.