Research focusing on dialogue, interaction and spoken and written discourse is a dynamic field that has developed considerably over the past two decades within the Romance linguistics research network at Stockholm University. Both institutional and informal spoken languages in different types of activities, as well as different genres of written discourse, have been the subject of research.
Within the French Linguistics research group, discourse analysis has had a large and growing importance during the last decades. A project focusing on Media Language - le Français Parlé des Médias – has been at the forefront of international research for two decades. Various media discourse genres have been studied, mainly from television but also newspapers. More recently, a particular interest has been given to televised political debates between the main candidates in the French presidential elections (1974-2017). The project examines different communicative activities such as 'arguing vs counter arguing', asking questions, addressing the other candidate and the representation of other's discourse' (Reported Speech), etc. The debates are analyzed in the light of linguistic theories and the larger communicative contexts. Comparative studies are carried out between the different debates over the last 40 years. Two anthologies and a large number of articles dealing with French in the Media have been published from 2007-2016 (see publication list). As part of the project, a series of international conferences has been organized by the Media group in collaboration with Media researchers in different French speaking countries as well as in Sweden, attracting participants from a large range of countries.
Within the Spanish Linguistics research group, interaction and discourse linguistics is today the strongest represented linguistic research field. A comprehensive scientific exchange program focusing on verbal interaction (VISSAS / EIVES Verbal Interaction Studies in Santiago and Stockholm) was active in 2006-2011 with the exchange of student teachers and researchers in each direction. This program has generated several conferences as well as a number of master's and doctoral dissertations. A research network, EDICE, has been founded around courtesy discourse in Spanish. Within the framework of this research network, six international conferences have been held since the network started, in 2002, and several hundred works have been published focusing on courtesy discourse in different genres and activities from a socio-cultural perspective. The network today forms the basis of an internationally leading research area focusing on Spanish pragmatics. Since 2013, EDICE has published the international journal Pragmática Sociocultural (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/soprag). Institutional discourse, in the context of a legal context, constitutes the subject of several studies in Spanish. Argumentation structure, speeches, forms of speech, discourse markers and intersubjectivity are other prominent research objects in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as various aspects of intercultural communication. In all the above mentioned areas, interaction analysis has been an essential tool.
Since 2014, a new interdisciplinary project has been created with discourse analysis as the main focus: Political Discourses in the Romance Speaking Countries: Linguistics and Social Sciences perspectives (ROMPOL). The project brings together researchers from different Romance language areas and is driven from a political science and linguistic perspective, by researchers, from the humanities and the social sciences, who are active at Stockholm University. The research idea is based on the assumption that knowledge and understanding of political discourse is best achieved through cooperation between the disciplines of linguistics and social sciences. The political discourse is analyzed in its social and historical context or vice versa, and the impact of the social and historical reality on the language. The group has already organized two international workshops, one in October 2014 on political election debates, and one in October 2016 about political discourse and the extremes. A following anthology will come out in 2018.
An interest shared by researchers from all four subjects is the study of discourse markers, mainly argumentative connectors and speech/interaction controlling particles.