Virginia (she, her, lei, idda) is a qualitative researcher and linguist who specialises in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics and works on Italian and English data. She holds a joint PhD in Linguistics and Human and Social Sciences at KU Leuven (Belgium) and Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland). In her PhD thesis “Collaborative Grammar: the temporality and emergence of clause combination in Italian talk-in-interaction”, she explored how collaborative clause combining relates to the sequential and temporal organization of turns in Italian talk-in-interaction. She looked at how the grammar of complex syntactical patterns emerges in multiperson interactions (in mundane and institutional settings, e.g., dinner parties and business meetings), through the practices of co-constructing and other-extending each others’ turns. To describe these practices, she used the umbrella turn Collaborative Turns. She paid particular attention to the interplay of grammar and embodiment, especially the role of participants’ gaze, to understand how people collaborate in everyday interaction.
