Eleni Kapogianni, Lecturer in Linguistics and co-director of the Centre for Language and Linguistics, and Christina Kim, Lecturer in Linguistics and Director of the Linguistics Laboratory, both based in the Department of English Language and Linguistics, were plenary speakers at the recent Manchester Forum in Linguistics, an annual conference for early career researchers in all fields of linguistics.

Eleni Kapogianni presented ‘A multi-level approach to verbal irony’, suggesting that a solution to common definitional and methodological problems concerning the investigation of verbal irony is to separate the ironic trope from its functions at the communicative and the interpersonal level. Situated within this framework of analysis, Eleni presented her current empirical findings on the culture-specificity of ironic functions, focusing specifically on the case of positive irony (a.k.a. ironic praise).

Christina Kim spoke on ‘Linguistic distance, social distance, and convergence in dialogue’, reporting on ongoing work with Dr Gloria Chamorro on structural priming in dialogues between native and non-native speakers.