Kobin Kendrick
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Kobin Kendrick is a conversation analyst who studies language use and embodied action in face-to-face social interaction. He earned his PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010 and was a staff scientist in the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands until 2016 when he moved to the U.K. to become a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York.  

Career

• Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
  Research Coordinator (2011-2016)
  Staff Scientist (2010-2011)
• University of California, Santa Barbara
  PhD in Linguistics (2010)
  MA in Linguistics (2006)

Departmental roles

• Chair of Board of Studies

Research

Overview

My research examines language and body behavior as resources for action in social interaction. Using conversation analysis (CA), I examine video recordings of participants engaged in everyday activities in order to investigate the basic mechanics of social interaction (e.g., turn-taking, repair, sequence organization, preference), taking a multimodal approach that focuses not only on language but also on the embodied actions of the participants.

Projects

• The recruitment of assistance in interaction
• Gaze direction in conversation  
• Addressee pointing in conflictual environments
• Turn-taking in embodied interaction

Research group(s)

• Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication

Collaborators

• Paul Drew (Loughborough University)
• Judith Holler (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

Available PhD research projects

I would be happy to supervise research projects that use conversation analysis to examine social actions (e.g., offers, requests), basic interactional organizations (e.g., turn-taking, sequence organization, repair, preference), and embodied actions (e.g., gaze direction), both in English and Mandarin Chinese as well as other languages. I do not work with politeness theory or speech act theory and cannot supervise research projects that use these frameworks.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• The Language of Turn and Sequence
• Structure of English

External activities

Memberships

• International Society for Conversation Analysis 

Invited talks and conferences

• Invited speaker. On the multimodal nature of turn-taking: the interplay of talk, gaze and gesture in the coordination of turn transitions. Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction. The Royal Society Discussion Meeting. April 5, 2022.
• Invited speaker. The multimodal organization of assistance in interaction. Prof. Lorenza Mondada’s research group, University of Basel. April 25, 2019.
• Plenary speaker. 11th Annual Conversation Analysis Day Meeting. Loughborough University, UK. December 18, 2017.
• Plenary speaker (with Paul Drew). Intersubjectivity in Action Conference. University of Helsinki, Finland. May 13, 2017.
• Plenary speaker. From offers and requests to recruitment: The organization of assistance in interaction. 43th Finnish Conference of Linguistics, Oulu, Finland. May 25-27, 2016.
• Invited lecture. Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for action. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex. Essex, UK.February 25, 2016.
• Invited lecture. Final particles and action formation in Mandarin Chinese. Department of Social Sciences Seminar Series. Loughborough University, UK. March 9, 2011.