Harrie Mazeland (1949)
studied Dutch Linguistics and Literature as an undergraduate,
and did a masters in General Linguistics at Nijmegen University (the Netherlands, 1975).
He got his PhD from the Faculty of Arts of Groningen University (1992). The German linguists
Konrad Ehlich and Jochen Rehbein were very influential teachers for his introduction into the field of
discourse analysis, functional pragmatics and action logic (the period from 1977 until
1985).
Mazeland got his basic training in conversation analytic skills from Gail Jefferson during the eighties,
and took courses from Emanuel Schegloff during a stay as a visiting scholar at UCLA (1997-98).
Apart from an appointment at the Department of Dutch Studies of the Free University Amsterdam,
and a guest professorship at the
International Graduate School in Language and Communication
(autumn 1998, Odense University Denmark),
Mazeland worked from 1990 until 2014 as a (senior) lecturer at the department of Language and Communication
of the University Groningen. He retired in September 2014.
Research affiliation:
Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen CLCG;
teaching in the academic programs for
Communication and Information Studies
and Research Master Linguistics.
His main research interest is on
language use in talk in interaction
(conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, discourse and grammar).
His publications include
a handbook-like introduction to conversation analysis (2003), a monograph on question/answer-sequences (1992),
several articles on constructional features of utterances in sequences of actions,
and a series of papers on categorization practices in talk in interaction.
He supervised the PhD-projects of Marjan Huisman, Trevor Benjamin and others.
In the eighties, Mazeland worked as a researcher in a research project
on classroom interaction, particularly with respect to the methodology
of discourse analysis (funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, with
Konrad Ehlich and Jochen Rehbein as supervisors),
and in a conversation analytic project on the interaction in
non-standardized research interviews
(funded by the Dutch Research Council NWO, supervisor Paul ten Have).
Mazeland's masters thesis (1975) was on classroom interaction. He was also one
of the co-authors of a critical study of sociolinguistic theories about
the relationship between language and social class
(together with Jan Lenders and Michel van Nieuwstadt, 1978).