Emeline Janine D Pierre

Émeline is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Postdoctoral Fellowship). She is specialized in functional and contrastive corpus-based linguistics and is currently working at the Istituto di Argomentazione, Linguistica e Semiotica, headed by Prof. Sara Greco and Prof. Andrea Rocci, at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Switzerland.

Her research interests are centered around the relationship between syntax, pragmatics, and argumentation, with a focus on how linguistic structures contribute to meaning construction in diverse communicative settings.

Émeline earned her Ph.D in Linguistics from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) under the supervision of Prof. B. De Cock. Her thesis was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), the Wallonia-Brussels Federation research fund. During her doctoral research, she explored the use of six agent-defocussing constructions in English, French and Spanish, in two registers and two modes. She examined the behaviour of nineteen syntactico-pragmatic features, related to the verb, the participants, or the linguistic context within which the construction appeared.

Her current research project, titled "The Linguistic Representation of Agentivity in Fashion Controversies and its Connection to Argumentative Strategies" explores the linguistic representation of agentivity within fashion controversies, investigating its connections to argumentative strategies. The study argues that the different linguistic representations of the agent, including the absence of explicit agent, reflect different argumentative strategies in negotiating the relationship problem/solution in sustainable fashion controversies.

This project is funded by the SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship TMPFP1_217350 and hosted at the Università della Svizzera italiana.