Robert W. Schrauf

I take it as an empirical given that language is the behavioral medium of social and cultural life. Perhaps more colloquially, I believe that we “do” ourselves (and culture and society) in talk and text. Languages are multiple, of course, as are cultures, and we need a range of appropriate tools for capturing this diversity. In Mixed Methods: Interviews, Surveys, and Cross-Cultural Comparisons (Cambridge,2016), I develop a language-based, discursive framework that integrates the micro-level of face-to-face cultural interaction in the language(s) of participants with the macro-level of cultural discourses in which they are socially positioned as speakers. One of the signal events in my intellectual life was participating (right after my doctorate) in the National Science Foundation’s Summer Institutes in Comparative Anthropological Research at the Claremont Colleges in California. I was then, and am now, enthralled by the challenge of cross-cultural comparison.

The demonstration data in the Mixed Methods book comes from a series of projects on ethnicity and Alzheimer’s disease, and in a second strain of discourse-centered work, I attend to the layered discourse of Alzheimer’s disease (from quotidian to clinical). My first appointment after the doctorate was in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and there I shared deep interests in language and dementia with colleagues in the NU Alzheimer’s Disease Center. Years anon, I have had the great good fortune of working with several clinical linguists, sociolinguists, conversation analysts, and applied linguists on two edited volumes that feature careful, fine-grained analysis of linguistic interaction by and about persons with dementia. With Nicole Müller (University of Norrköping), I edited Dialogue and Dementia: Cognitive and Communicative Resources for Engagement (Routledge, 2014), and with Charlotta Plejert, as lead editor (also from the University of Norrköping) and Camilla Lindholm (University of Helsinki),I collaborated as a co-editor on Multilingual Interaction in Dementia (Multilingual Matters, 2017). The research represented in these works seeks to unpack how individuals, whose spoken language abilities seem to be slipping away, are crucially engaged in collaborative meaning-making via subtle semiotic signaling if we learn to attend to them.

Language-and-dementia is but one topic in the wider landscape of language and aging, and Kees de Bot (University of Groningen) and I edited Language Development Over The Lifespan (Routledge, 2009), in which applied linguists and language scholars from a variety of theoretical backgrounds differentially address issues of second language acquisition and development in longitudinal perspective.

For the past 12 years I have enjoyed much stimulating conversation with faculty colleagues and students in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Penn State University. The department specializes in social approaches to second language acquisition and usage-based linguistics, and to our common passion for Things Linguistic, I bring a language-in-use interest in cross-cultural comparison and dementia.