Angeliki Balantani completed her PhD at the University of Essex. Her doctoral research addresses the interactional significance of some of the most commonly occurring tokens in Greek everyday interaction, while simultaneously exploring the real-life consequences of these tokens in communication and the social relations that the interlocutors are building up through interaction.
Following her PhD studies, she has worked as an associate lecturer at the University of Birkbeck (2018-2019) and is currently appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow on the FNS-funded project “Deixis and Joint Attention: Vision in Interaction (DEJA-VI)”. Her research on the project investigates the role of gesture and gaze in the use of the deictic expression “SO”. Specifically, she investigates the role of gaze in ongoing activities-instructions in manual tasks where there is no monitoring. Additionally, she examines data in which gaze is not the prime modality and considers what happens to multimodal constructions when not all the features of a “multimodal Gestalt” (Goodwin 2003, 2007; Mondada 2014, 2015; Stukenbrock 2010, 2014, 2015) are present. Furthermore, she explores the role of the deictic expression “SO” when coupled with pointing gestures instead of iconic ones in order to identify the interactional function of this token in pointing gestures.