Barbara Fox


Barbara Fox (Ph.D., UCLA) is Professor and Chair of the Linguistics department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has primarily worked on English data, but has also worked with students on Japanese, Finnish, German, and Malay. There is now a community of scholars exploring grammar as it arises and is used in everyday communication, working towards a new understanding of language; this is the research I engage in. The understanding shared by this community includes the following ideas:

  1. Utterances accomplish social actions with particular recipients and are designed for those recipients, to achieve those actions.
  2. Every utterance occurs in a particular location in the activity (sequential location) and derives a good deal of its interpretation from that location.
  3. Every utterance is produced in time, and proceeds towards completion and with an orientation towards other speakers starting to speak (or failing to start to speak).
  4. Utterances are embodied -- that is, they are constructed out of various body behaviors, such as gaze direction, gestures, large body movements, intonation patterns, and so on.
  5. (The exact manner in which an utterance is produced -- with 'dysfluencies', pauses, gaze directed at a particular recipient, etc. -- is an integral whole which cannot be reduced to just the word spoken.

Key Words:
Discourse-functional syntax, grammar and interaction, conversation analysis, situated/distributed cognition

Recent publications:

Ford, C., Fox, B., and S. Thompson (Eds.). (2001). The Language of Turn and Sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fox, B. 2001. Evidentiality: Authority, responsibility and entitlement in English conversation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 1-26.

Fox, B. (ed.) Studies in Anaphora. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1996.

Fox, B., Hayashi, M, and R. Jasperson. 1996. Resources and repair: a cross-linguistic study of the syntactic organization of repair. In E. Ochs, E. Schegloff & S. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.