I am a doctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Literature at the University of Basel, where I am part of the SNSF-funded project The first five words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space directed by Lorenza Mondada and Elwys De Stefani (KU Leuven). Prior to joining the French department, I completed my MA studies in Language and Communication at the University of Basel in 2019.

My research centers on the use of language in everyday life, focusing on naturally-occurring social interaction. I bring together methods from Multimodal Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, and Ethnomethodology to investigate multilingualism in interaction – with a particular focus on how previously unacquainted people spontaneously engage in interaction across a range of public places in French-, German-, and Italian-speaking Switzerland. Based on video-recordings collected in multilingual cities, touristic locations, and areas of multiple contact, my work contributes to the study of language contact, multilingualism, and code-switching, particularly research into language choice and language negotiation in locally situated interaction; face-to-face openings; interaction in public places; and naturalistic studies of first-time encounters between “strangers.”

Dissertation (working title):

On the organization of multilingual chance encounters between unacquainted people in public space

2023      P. Hänggi, & J. Schneerson. Opening. In A. Gubina, E. Hoey & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA).

2023     Hänggi, P., & Schneerson, J. Pre-opening. In A. Gubina, E. Hoey & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA).

2023     Schneerson, J., & Hänngi, P. Pre-beginning. In A. Gubina, E. Hoey & C. W. Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA).

2022     Hänggi, P. Language choice and the multilingual soundscape: Overhearing as a resource for recipient-design in impromptu first-time encounters. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 55(4), 299–325. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2022.2128003

2022     D’Antoni, F., Debois, T., De Stefani, E., Hänggi, P., Mondada, L., Schneerson, J., & Tekin, B. S. Encounters in public places: The establishment of interactional space in face-to-face openings. In A. H. Jucker & H. Hausendorf (Eds.), Pragmatics of Space (pp. 281–315). De Gruyter Mouton. doi: 10.1515/9783110693713-010

2020     Mondada, L., Bänninger, J., Bouaouina, S. A., Gauthier, G., Hänggi, P., Koda, M., Svensson, H., Tekin, B. S. Doing paying during the Covid-19 pandemic. Discourse Studies, 22(6), 720–752. doi: 10.1177/1461445620950860

2020     Mondada, L., Bänninger, J., Bouaouina, S. A., Camus, L., Gauthier, G., Hänggi, P., Koda, M., Svensson, H., Tekin, B. S. Human sociality in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic: A systematic examination of change in greetings. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24(4), 441–468. doi: 10.1111/josl.12433

2020     Mondada, L., Bänninger, J., Bouaouina, S. A., Gauthier, G., Hänggi, P., Koda, M., Svensson, H., Tekin, B. S. Changing social practices: Covid-19 and new forms of sociality. Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, 2, 217–232. doi: 10.3240/97807

2017     Hänggi, P., & Diederich, C. Accommodating language: A comparative investigation of the use of euphemisms for death and dying in obituaries in English and in German. In A. Capone & V. Parvaresh (Eds.), The Pragmeme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 277–299). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

-     Conversation Analysis

-     Multimodality

-     Ethnomethodology

-     Multilingual interaction

-     Embodiment