Sophia Fiedler

Contact information

Applied linguistics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics

Education

• Ph.D. Applied Linguistics,  Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Universität Hamburg (Germany)

Biography

Dr. Fiedler is a visiting researcher at the University of Waterloo from February to December 2024. In the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, she conducts research on how grammar is used in everyday conversation and how learners acquire German as a second language. In Fall 2024, she will co-teach a postgraduate course on Conversation Analysis.

Dr. Fiedler’s research interests lie in Interactional Linguistics and grammar in interaction. She explores how speakers use grammar, along with other resources like body movements and facial expressions, to perform social actions. Her focus languages are German and French. Key questions she investigates include: Why do speakers sometimes use subordinate clauses with the verb in final position and other times with the verb in second position? What are the implications of these two grammatical formats in everyday talk? Her research aims to demonstrate that grammar is not an abstract set of rules but rather emerges through everyday interaction and is an integral part of human sociality that speakers use to actually do things like responding, assessing, accounting, or explaining.

She also studies how learners of German as a second language acquire grammatical structures over time, with a focus on the interactional competence that L2 speakers develop through their use of grammar in conversation.