Linguistic Analysis Methods for Studying Small Groups

Introduction Linguistic analysis of collaboration is a research area with stakeholders from multiple fields, including learning sciences, organizational behavior, sociolinguistics and other areas of linguistics, language technologies and machine learning, social psychology, and sociology. Each field brings with it its own valuable store of wisdom as well as its own sets of research questions and methodologies that bring out different subsets of facets. While we view collaboration from a multidisciplinary perspective, we adopt a technical definition of what linguistic analysis is, specifically an analysis that employs constructs from the field of linguistics that are designed to study language as a primary focus of inquiry. While a wide variety of valuable frameworks for studying the language of collaboration have been developed within the learning sciences community, instead of considering these linguistic analyses of collaboration per se, we consider them applications of theoretical constructs from the learning sciences to language interactions. The focus is on learning processes viewed through language rather than the language processes themselves. The advantage of a linguistic framework is that it allows us to avoid making a commitment to one specific theoretical perspective within the learning sciences. Within the broad field of linguistics, we focus on a specific subcommunity referred to as Systemic Functional Linguistics. The field of systemic functional linguistics is a largely descriptive linguistic tradition that provides a firm foundation in analyses of genres of writing or text-based interaction (Martin & Rose, 2007; Martin & White, 2005), as well as face-to-face interaction (Veel, 1999), characterized in terms of the choices authors and speakers make about how to present themselves through language (Halliday, 1994). The choices that authors and 2 speakers make are mapped out in decision tree representations referred to as systems, which is where it gets its name. The constructs coming from the field of systemic functional linguistics provide us with a common foundation for exploring stylistic norms of conversational behavior across genres of dialogic interactions. What makes it an ideal choice for our efforts is the historical fact that it grew up side-by-side with one of the few sociological theories that was informed by linguistic data. As such, in contrast to other existing linguistic theories, it was fashioned specifically for the purpose of explaining sociological processes at multiple levels and within a wide range of contexts. Beyond these social phenomena, mechanisms such as grammatical metaphor (Halliday, 1994) endow it with the ability to represent …