Cecilia E. Ford

Professor, Language and Linguistics / Rhetoric and Composition
608-263-2706
ceford@wisc.edu
Professional Website: mendota.english.wisc.edu/~ceford/
ELL Website: www.english.wisc.edu/ell/

Degrees and Institutions

PhD Applied Linguistics, UCLA, 1988
M.A. Linguistics, California State University, Northridge (CSUN), 1982
Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language, UCLA, 1981
B.A. Linguistics, CSUN, 1978

Research Interests

Conversation and discourse analysis, functional approaches to language structure, gender and language, and structure of English.

Selected Publications

Grammar and Interaction: Adverbial Clauses in American English Conversations (Cambridge 1993 [paperback reissue, 2006]), Interaction-Based Studies of Language (Special issue of Pragmatics 1996), The Language of Turn and Sequence (Oxford 2002), Sound Patterns in Interaction: Cross-linguistic Studies of Phonetics and Prosody for Conversation (Benjamins 2004), Contingency and units in interaction (Discourse Studies 2004). Currntly completing a book on women’s participation talking in workplace meetings, a culmination of hresearch with the NSF-funded Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

Personal Statement

In my research and teaching, I draw on conversation analysis as a framework for discovering the ways that humans construct, on a moment-by-moment basis, the social orders that make up our lives—including the provisional and emergent practices we call language. I am most interested in working with students and colleagues looking real-time interactional language use, combining the study of social organization with the study of language. I am particularly fascinated with the architecture of turns at talk and how we improvise with grammar, sound production, and physical orientations (gesture, gaze, body position) to co-construct joint courses of action.