Selina Schmidt
Selina Schmidt is currently a Research Assistant at Birmingham City University, where she is working on the School of English impact case studies that will be returned to REF2021.
Before completing her PhD in English Linguistics at Birmingham City University, she studied at Saarland University in Germany, gaining qualifications in English and Spanish Linguistics, Literatures and Culture Studies as well as European Studies. Selina researches in the field of Corpus Pragmatics, which lies at the intersection of Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics. Her particular emphasis is on creating ways in which rapport management can more meaningfully be analysed by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods.
This reflects her general aim of supporting others with their research. Selina is a principal investigator of the CASE Project, which was started in 2012 at Saarland University with the aim of collecting video-mediated conversations in an international English-language context and thus create a unique dataset or "corpus" that allows new and exciting research of this particular communication type.
She has published a series of articles and chapters which have explored in depth language features of this communication type. Selina has taught various undergraduate courses in linguistics and intercultural communication.
Her strong foundation in research and teaching is complemented by her experience in academic and business administration and her Prince2 qualification in project management.
Current Activity
- Corpus Pragmatics
- Corpus linguistics
- Pragmatics
- Discourse analysis
- Conversation Analysis
- Culture, Sociology, and Psychology
Areas of Expertise
- Linguistics
- Corpus pragmatics
- Pragmatics
- Corpus linguistics
- Rapport management
- Laughter
- Pronouns
- Pragmatic markers
- Skype
- Online video conferencing
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy in English Linguistics, Birmingham City University, UK
- Master of Arts in English and Spanish Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany
- Bachelor of Arts in English and Spanish Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies and Europaicum (European Studies), Saarland University, Germany
Research
Rapport management in online spoken interaction: A cross-cultural linguistic analysis of communicative strategies
"I study rapport: a harmonious relationship between people. More specifically, I focus on the creation and maintenance of such a relationship through a process known as rapport management. My analysis looks at specific ways in which people use language to manage their relationships in ViMELF, the corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. My research addresses various gaps in rapport research by analysing rapport management in a corpus as an applied example. There is a disconnect between the study of a macro-linguistic concept like rapport (social and interactional strategies) and the micro-linguistic features that help manage rapport. There is also a disconnect between qualitative and quantitative research on rapport. This thesis bridges these gaps by combining qualitative and quantitative approaches and focussing on three linguistic features that affect a specific rapport strategy, that of stance or conversational positioning. Rather than trying to capture rapport in its entirety, this thesis constitutes a new approach to the analysis of rapport strategies and features and their extraction from larger datasets. To achieve that, I ask three research questions: (1) Which linguistic strategies and features are used when managing rapport, (2) How is the rapport management strategy influenced by the medium, the speakers’ backgrounds and idiosyncrasies, and (3) How can corpus linguistic methods be appropriated to analyse a rapport strategy and its realisations in the form of linguistic features? The knowledge generated with this research is theoretical as well as practical in nature. My thesis contributes to academic knowledge about how the three linguistic features—pronouns, pragmatic markers and laughter—influence how unacquainted speakers positions themselves in conversation and thereby effectively manage rapport. I explore the features’ ambiguity, the different meanings that they take on depending on the context. Speakers either commit to a stance or, because of the ambiguity of the features, avoid doing so—depending on which function is necessary in a particular situation. This makes the features the perfect toolkit for navigating the fragile relationship speakers build with their conversation partner. My research also contributes practical knowledge about how corpus linguistic methods can be appropriated to advance rapport research, which results in a practical output in form of a software tool developed for this purpose. As an essential step in combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the thesis adopts the concept of co-occurrences and applies these to the linguistic features in the spoken corpus data, which has great potential for further research with other features, as it reveals their patterns of use in new ways."
Postgraduate Supervision
- Andrew Kehoe
- Michaela Mahlberg
Publications
Publications
Brunner, Marie-Louise; Stefan Diemer; and Selina Schmidt. 2018. "I mean ... we have good coffee in Italy ... why do we need Starbucks?" - "America" in the Construction and Negotiation of European Identities. (Pop) cultures on the move: Transnational identifications and cultural exchange between East and West, ed. by Astrid Fellner, Tetiana Ostapchuk, and Bärbel Schlimbach. 17-33. Saarbrücken: Saravi Pontes. http://universaar.uni-saarland.de/monographien/volltexte/2018/174/.
Brunner, Marie-Louise; Stefan Diemer; and Selina Schmidt. 2017. "... okay so good luck with that ((laughing))?" – Managing rich data in a corpus of Skype conversations. Big and Rich Data in English Corpus Linguistics: Methods and Explorations (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 19), ed. by Turo Hiltunen, Joe McVeigh, and Tanja Säily. Helsinki: VARIENG. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/19/brunner_diemer_schmidt/.
Diemer, Stefan; Marie-Louise Brunner; and Selina Schmidt. 2016. Compiling computer-mediated spoken language corpora: Key issues and recommendations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21(3). 348-371. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ijcl.21.3/main.
Brunner, Marie-Louise; Stefan Diemer; and Selina Schmidt. 2016. "It's always different when you look something from the inside" – Linguistic innovation in a corpus of ELF Skype conversations. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 2(2). [Special issue: Linguistic Innovations: Rethinking linguistic creativity in non-native Englishes, ed. by Sandra C. Deshors, Sandra Götz, and Samantha Laporte]. 321-348. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ijlcr.2.2/main.
Schmidt, Selina; and Stefan Diemer. 2015. Comments on the criticism of Anglicisms in Spain. Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics 2015(5). 8-16. https://publikationen.sulb.uni-saarland.de/handle/20.500.11880/23701.
Brunner, Marie-Louise; Stefan Diemer; and Selina Schmidt. 2014. "Like, Pasta, Pizza and Stuff" – New Trends in Online Food Discourse. CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food cultures / Revue des cultures culinaires au Canada. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1026769ar.
Other publications
CASE. 2018. Corpus of Academic Spoken English – Recordings. Birkenfeld: Trier University of Applied Sciences. [http://umwelt-campus.de/case].
ViMELF. 2018. Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations. Birkenfeld: Trier University of Applied Sciences. [http://umwelt-campus.de/case]
BabyCASE. 2017. 20 conversations from the CASE project. Birkenfeld: Trier University of Applied Sciences & Saarbrücken: Saarland University. [http://umwelt-campus.de/case].
FoodCASE 2015. Conversations about food from the CASE project. Birkenfeld: Trier University of Applied Sciences & Saarbrücken: Saarland University. [http://umwelt-campus.de/case].
Conferences
July 2017. The pragmatics of laughter in conversations between unacquainted international students. Paper presented at IPrA2017 – 15th International Pragmatics Conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
July 2017. Laughing about food in CASE – "Little green round ones" and other delicate topics. Paper presented at IPrA2017 – 15th International Pragmatics Conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland. (with Sina Burghardt)
May 2017. Multimodal meaning making: Developing a taxonomy for the transcription of gesture in a corpus of Skype conversations. Paper presented at ICAME38 - Corpus et Orbis: Interpreting the World through Corpora, Prague, Czech Republik. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
April 2017. Laughter as a means of creating rapport between unacquainted international students. Paper presented at BELP 2017: Birmingham English Language Postgraduate Conference, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
September 2016. "... uhm Knödel ((German)) I don't know if there is a word in English for that ((chuckling))" - Context and discursive functions of code-switching in intercultural Skype conversations. Paper presented at ISLE4 - 4th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, Poznań, Poland. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
June 2016. "You are struggling forwards, and you don't know, and then you … you do code-switching…" - Code-switching in ELF Skype conversations. Paper presented at 9th International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF9), Universitat de Lleida, Spain. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
December 2015. "It's incredible with fresh berries, in France or elsewhere" - Le discours culinaire se répand en ligne. Paper presented at the Colloque "La gastronomie à l'ère numérique," ATILF, Nancy, France. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
November 2015. "And it all started with a big bang - BANG!" - Sprache und Humor in The Big Bang Theory (Language and humor in The Big Bang Theory). Invited talk at Erfolg in Serie (Serial Success) lecture series, Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut (German-American Institute), Saarbrücken, Germany. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
October 2015. "... okay so good luck with that ((laughing))?" - Managing rich data in a corpus of Skype conversations. Paper presented at d2e - From Data to Evidence, Helsinki, Finland. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
July 2015. Food goes online – "So, Knoedel and like, pasta, pizza and stuff". Paper presented at 14th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 14), Antwerp, Belgium. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
May 2015. "It's always different when you look something from the inside" - Linguistic innovation in a corpus of EFL Skype conversations. Paper presented at ICAME36 - Words, words, words, Trier, Germany. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
November 2014. Quality TV - Die Sprache als Erfolgsgeheimnis? Keynote at Quality TV, Saarbrücken, Germany. (with Marie-Louise Brunner, Caroline Collet, and Stefan Diemer)
September 2014. A piece of cake? - Developing a pragmatic annotation layer for a corpus of international academic spoken English. ESSE, Kosice, Slovakia. (with Marie-Louise Brunner)
August 2014. Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. ISLE 3, Zurich, Switzerland. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
June 2014. CASE – The Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Workshop at ICSE, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
June 2014. Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. ICSE, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
May 2014. Better than the real thing? Food talk in online discourse. FaCT, Bertinoro, Italy. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)
April 2014. Starting Skype conversations: Pragmatic features and strategies in an International English context. ICAME35, Nottingham, United Kingdom. (with Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer)