I grew up in Barcelona, Spain, and later lived in the Netherland for 13 years, in California for 3,5 years, and have been in Hangzhou since September 2015. I did undergraduate studies in Anglo-Germanic Philology and a research master in English Language at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and I also received a research master’s degree from the University of Amsterdam and a Ph.D. from the Free University of Amsterdam (VU).
I am mostly interested in the interrelation between language, interaction, and cognition. If human babies learn to interact long before they learn to speak, and if face-to-face conversation is the most common form of communication, I am interested in looking into the question: how is the structure of interaction reflected in language structure and language use? That is, what forms does the basic interactional pattern of turn-taking take in grammar and discourse? In addition, I’m interested in the communicative functions and effectiveness of interactional structures embedded in discourse. From a linguistic perspective I am mostly interested in what I’ve called ‘fictive interaction’ (Pascual 2002, 2006, 2014), a cognitive phenomenon that reflects the interactional structure of conversation, and is manifested in language structure and use. Fictive interaction occurs at different levels: (i) the level of the discourse (monologue conceptualized as dialogue); (ii) the sentence (rhetorical questions); (iii) the clause (“They thought, hey, I may find it”); (iv) the phrase (“the attitude of yes, I can do it”); and (v) the word (“forget-me-nots”, “a ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude”). The following publications are the most representatives of the work I do:
1. Pascual, E. 2006a. Questions in legal monologues: Fictive interaction as argumentative strategy in a murder trial. Text & Talk 26(3): 383-402.
2. Pascual, E. 2006b. Fictive interaction within the sentence: A communicative type of fictivity in grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 17(2): 245-267.
3. Pascual, E. 2008. Text for context, trial for trialogue: An ethnographic study of a fictive interaction blend. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6: 50-82.
4. Pascual, E., E. Królak & Th.A.J.M. Janssen. 2013. Direct speech compounds: Evoking socio-cultural scenarios through fictive interaction. Cognitive Linguistics 24(2): 345-366.
5. Pascual, E. 2014. Fictive Interaction: The Conversation Frame in Thought, Language, and Discourse. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
6. Xiang, M., & Pascual, E. 2016. Debate with Zhuangzi: Fictive interaction blends in ancient Chinese philosophy. Pragmatics 26(1): 137-162.
7. Jarque, M.J. & E. Pascual. 2016. Mixed viewpoints in factual and fictive discourse in Catalan Sign Language narratives. In B. Dancygier, W.-l. Lu & A. Verhagen (eds.). Viewpoint and the Fabric of Meaning: Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools across Languages and Modalities. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 259-280.
8. Pascual, E. & S. Sandler (eds.). 2016. The Conversation Frame: Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
9. Pascual, E. & T. Oakley. Forth. (by invitation). Fictive interaction. In B. Dancygier (ed.). Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
One of my goals at Zhejiang University is to explore the role of fictive interaction constructions in Chinese language, both in Mandarin Chinese and in Chinese dialects and minority languages without writing.
E-mail: pascual@zju.edu.cn, esther@estherpascual.com
Personal website: http://estherpascual.com/
