Is there a close link between linguistic structures and the exigencies of face-to-face interaction? Support for this hypothesis would be provided by findings that linguistic structures are, at least in part, shaped by the communicative and interactional settings they occur in.

In Research Area 2, we take a fresh look at linguistic structures from the perspective of their role in communicative trouble management. We ask: Which linguistic structures lead to communicative trouble, and how? Conversely, how do linguistic structures contribute to resolving or preventing trouble? This includes, e.g., elliptical responses and other forms of fragmentary speech, short anaphora or discourse particles.

A major task in this endeavor will be to gain a better understanding of how linguistic structures work in everyday conversation, as most research on linguistic structures to date is based on written language, narrative speech or isolated sentences created for the purpose of exemplification. Integrating the portability aspect of our research program, we explore both face-to-face communication and communicative settings employing new practices in spelling and abbreviated written language such as chat communication. Guided by the hypothesis that linguistic structures are (partly) shaped by the communicative settings they occur in, we would predict that specific communicative settings bring about specific usage patterns which over time become fully grammaticalized structures in a given language.