Freja Ruby Flejsborg, Aarhus University
This presentation explores how decolonial pedagogy is enacted within higher education, moving beyond its articulation as critique toward its lived practice. While decolonial thought has powerfully challenged the dominance of Western epistemologies, the practical processes through which these transformations unfold within universities remain under-theorized.
Drawing on ongoing research in collaboration with the Indigenous and intercultural university Amawtay Wasi in Ecuador, I examine how decolonial pedagogy is negotiated within institutions still shaped by colonial and neoliberal structures. I critically engage with the concept of delinking, arguing that its emphasis on separation from “the West” risks reproducing binary logics and obscuring the entangled realities of knowledge production.
In response, I foreground vincularidad (relationality) as a key orientation, highlighting how Amawtay Wasi enacts decolonial pedagogy through practices that connect knowledge, territory, and community. I suggest that greater attention should be paid to the relational and friction-filled spaces where epistemologies meet, as crucial sites for rethinking decolonial praxis in higher education.
Isabelle P. Petiot, Aarhus University /Université de Tours
This paper presents selected elements of my research on virtual language exchange between Danish students and peers from other European universities, primarily in France. It focuses on individual experiences and perspectives in relation to the Other, situated “on the other side of the border.” The study explores the relationship between identity and language, as well as the role of institutions such as the Council of Europe in fostering a sense of belonging among individuals designated as “citizens,” yet often positioned within the broader dynamics of globalization (cf. Recommendation CM/Rec(2022)1).
In this context, I analyze the implications of a world identity (citoyen.ne-monde) for language learners, as well as for individuals using languages in practice, through their experiences of exchange and, to a lesser extent, mobility within Western Europe.
My analysis draws on survey results from Northern Europe (A. Darling & F. Dervin, 2023) and on in-depth interviews conducted with students and teachers participating in these exchanges as part of my thesis.
Finally, the paper argues that France’s “policy of influence” increasingly aligns with the educational frameworks of the Council of Europe, shifting from the promotion of the French language itself to the dissemination of language teaching methodologies (Emmanuelle Huver, 2025), in contrast to genuinely diversity-oriented approaches (Véronique Castellotti, Marc Debono, & Emmanuelle Huver, 2016).
Lada Achilova, Université Grenoble Alpes
The research, as part of a PhD thesis, focuses on language learning in virtual exchange (VE).
In VE projects, learners engage in an authentic dialogue with peers from different geographical locations, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, thereby developing linguistic and intercultural competence.
Language learning in a VE is a social and collaborative experience, where knowledge is co-constructed and skills developed through social interactions.
We examine how social presence among participants is fostered through expression of emotions, open communication, and group cohesion. Once social presence is established, how can it affect learning outcomes? We also investigate another aspect developed in VE project: willingness to communicate, participants’ predisposition to engage in conversation in a foreign language.
We explore both variables in a VE and attempt to establish a connection between them based on data from three different VE projects.
Ida Marie Thomsen Krarup, Aarhus University
Speech perception is multisensory and does not purely rely on auditory input. Visual input has been shown to influence the perception of native speech sounds (McGurk and MacDonald 1976) and the acquisition of non-native speech sounds (Hazan et al. 2005, Lee et al. 2018). There is some evidence that tactile input, such as a puff of air mimicking the air released during aspirated sounds, can affect the perception of aspirated sounds (Gick and Derrick 2009, Saito et al. 2024).
Another tactile modality associated with speech production is vibrations, as the vocal folds vibrate during the production of voiced sounds. This project examines whether the presence or absence of vibrations can affect the perception of voicing contrasts such as the English /s-z/ contrast. This will be done both with native English speakers who are very familiar with this contrast, as well as native German speakers who have this contrast to a lesser extent and native Danish speakers who do not have this contrast in their native language.
The results of these experiments may contribute to understanding what kinds of sensory input affect how we perceive speech and how this may (or may not) differ based on language background and familiarity with the sounds in question.
Anna-Merete Thinggaard, Aarhus University
The because X construction (as in You're doing it wrong, because MATH (COCA)), is well attested in English, and has also been documented for many other languages and language families (Konvička and Stöcker 2022, 335). Early discussions of the construction especially focused on the strangeness of this because being able to take nominal complements (e.g. Liberman 2012).
Furthermore, it has previously been suggested for English that nominal complements may be subject to structural restrictions, with prenominal modification reported to reduce acceptability (e.g. McCulloch 2012; Bergs 2018, 48). However, the empirical basis for such claims remains limited, and it is unclear to what extent they generalise beyond English.
In this talk, I draw on data from an acceptability judgement study to investigate the limits of nominal complements in the Danish because (fordi) X construction. Specifically, I examine how different types of nominal complements are evaluated, and whether modification systematically affects acceptability. In exploring whether these factors systematically affect acceptability, I aim to provide new empirical evidence on the distribution of nominal complements in the construction.
Romane Marcon, Université Grenoble Alpes
It is a well-established fact that the X’s way construction, or way-construction, entails motion of the subject referent along a path, and the verb expresses the means or manner of motion, or an incidental action which accompanies motion. It has also been established that the construction is being used with an increasing number of verbs, many of them being hapax legomena (Perek 2018), but studies which mention them focus on the productivity of the construction rather than the hapax themselves and their use in discourse. However, these marginal uses of the construction can give us a better understanding of the syntax and semantics of the construction. This presentation will thus focus specifically on nonce verb uses in the X’s way construction, in order to understand what semantic and pragmatic factors enable them. The data is taken from my corpus of 433 diet books published in the US between 1960 and 2017.
Ismaël Zaïdi, Université Grenoble Alpes
Generalisations are “propositions which do not express specific episodes or isolated facts, but instead report a kind of general property, that is, report a regularity which summarizes groups of particular episodes or facts.” (Krifka et al. 1995 : 2). The focus of this presentation is cases in which the NP consisting of the + singular noun (the American) is a generic subject. Most studies are concerned with bare plurals (Americans); very few of them mention the + sg and even fewer take human groups into account, except to point out that the + sg with such groups raises a question of acceptability: ?The Italian loves pasta sounds as if the referent was “species-like” (Radden 2009 : 313). However, my data show that using generic the American is indeed not very common, but that generalisations with the American are much more frequent when associated to a modifier such as a PP (the American in the eighties used to…), a defining relative clause (the American who likes fast-food will…) or an adjective (the typical American/the average American). I will focus more specifically on the typical American and the average American, which are the two most frequent modifiers in my data. The aim of this presentation is to understand and shed light on the contexts in which such NPs tend to occur and the representations associated to them. These adjectives create subclasses of Americans: for what purpose? What discursive strategy is at work? In what contexts is average more frequent than/favoured over typical and vice versa?
