Simon Borchmann

My primary area of research is the pragmatics and semantics of activity embedded language use, for example, language use in aviation, road cycling or hunting. Within this area, I have studied coordination of attention and action, information structure, coherence, questions, interjections, short forms and directives using a range of different methods, including cognitive ethnographical field work, participatory observation, interaction analysis and quantitative and qualitative analysis of text corpora. A particular interesting result is an analysis of natural language information structure based on ecological theories of perception, information and affordances.

My secondary area of research is written communication. Within this area, I have studied coherence, information structure, textual inferences, selective attention strategies in reading, text organisation and genre using quantitative and qualitative analysis of text corpora and reading experiments, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of eye tracking data.