Esther Pascual

A native of Barcelona, Spain, with Dutch citizenship and an American accent, I'm currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. I'm mainly working on what I've labeled ‘fictive interaction’, namely the non-genuine use of the intersubjective structure of conversation, based on the cultural model of Language as informational. Examples are non-information seeking questions (e.g. 'Why do this? Because it matters') and non-quotational direct speech (e.g. 'the attitude of 'yes, I can'). I've studied this phenomenon in various languages (English, Dutch, Spanish, signed languages), discourse types (novels, advertisements, an ancient Chinese philosophical text), and in different socio-cultural and communicative settings (legal argumentation, political satire, the speech of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder). I do quite a bit of editorial work and have served as elected President (2018-2022) and Vice-President (2016-2018) of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS).