ABSTRACT
I move on to Trinity College Cambridge, home of kings and Princes, and great academics and philosophers, to do my Ph.D. I write about the very personal aspects of fitting in to the world’s best university and striving to reach the kinds of standards that they require. I become college field captain, college field colours, representing the university and so on, but always avoid talking about my past, as if it’s some sort of guilty and defining secret. I add another persona to my being. In my work, I focus on language in talk, again studying the generation of spontaneous speech by focussing on the location of individual pauses but study as well the nonverbal behaviours that connect to this process of linguistic generation, principally eye gaze and hand gesture in all its various forms. I’m looking at communication as essentially multimodal. I get my first lecturing post and then life intervenes again with a number of personal tragedies that make me pause and reflect on all the work that I’ve been doing up to that point, and its usefulness.
