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Michal Marmorstein

Dr Michal Marmorstein

Visiting Senior Lecturer

Biography

Dr Marmorstein is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Michal's research is in discourse analysis and interactional linguistics. She works primarily on Arabic and Hebrew in conversational, literary and digital contexts, and explores the role of verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources (e.g. tense forms, discourse particles, gestures) in constructing discourse structures (e.g. narrative), accomplishing social actions, and indexing stances and ideologies. Her research is also concerned with processes of diversification and adaptation of communicative resources across genres, modalities, and sociolinguistic systems.

Current research projects

  • Discourse markers in spoken and written Egyptian Arabic (PI, ISF-funded)
  • Confirmation requests and their response (member of the DFG-funded ‘Interactional Linguistics Scientific Network: Discourse particles from a cross-linguistic perspective’
  • Automatic segmentation of prosodic units in natural language processing (Associate Researcher, Israel Ministry of Science)
  • The prosody of spoken Arabic (Hebrew University­–King’s College London joint seed-funding scheme)
  • Responding to news in Arabic and English conversation (Associate Researcher, BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants

Corpus construction

  • Corpus of Hebrew WhatsApp Dialogues (HebWA)
  • Hebrew University Corpus of Spoken Hebrew (HCSH)

Selected publications

Marmorstein, Michal. 2016. Tense and Text in Classical Arabic: A Discourse-Oriented Study of the Classical Arabic Tense System. Brill (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 85): Leiden, 261 pages.

Marmorstein, Michal and Sclafani, Jennifer. 2019. ‘The talkback genre: Practice and the cultural construal of online commenting in Israel’, Discourse, Context, and Media 31, 1-10.

Marmorstein, Michal and Maschler, Yael. 2019. ‘Stance-taking via ya’ani/ya’anu: A discourse marker in a Hebrew-Arabic language contact situation’, Language in Society 49(1), 1-30.

Marmorstein, Michal. 2021. ‘Discourse markers as a lens to variation across speech and writing: Egyptian Arabic yaʕni (lit. ‘it means’) as a case study, Functions of Language 28(2), 153-182.

Marmorstein, Michal. 2021. ‘Displaying consideration via EHM (‘uhm’) in Hebrew WhatsApp dialogues’, Discourse, Context and Media 41, 1-9.

Marmorstein, Michal and Nadav Matalon. Forthcoming. Responses within Activities: Alignment via Egyptian Arabic ʔāh (‘yeah’) in Extended Turns, Interactional Linguistics.

Leon Shor and Michal Marmorstein. Under review. The Embodied Modification of Formulations: The Quoting Gesture (QG) in Israeli-Hebrew Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics.

 

Research

books-1204029_1920
Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication (LDC)

The Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication is a major centre for descriptive linguistics, applied linguistics and language in education.

Research

books-1204029_1920
Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication (LDC)

The Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication is a major centre for descriptive linguistics, applied linguistics and language in education.