I defended my dissertation entitled ‘The language of hospitality. Crossing the threshold between speech act and linguistic form’ at the University of Groningen in December 2019. My PhD project was a cooperation between the University of Groningen and the Hospitality Business School of Saxion University of Applied Sciences, both located in the Netherlands.
Traditionally, hospitality is primarily seen as an organizational resource which can be exchanged for monetary gains. In more recent years, realizing that hospitality is more than merely trading a bed and additional services for money, the desire to take a broader view to fully comprehend the concept of hospitality has been expressed by both the hospitality industry as by researchers in the field of Hospitality Studies.
To fulfill this ambition, in my PhD project I took a pragmalinguistic approach to hospitality. I studied how the use of language is related to the experience of hospitality. As such, my dissertation can be characterized as interdisciplinary; it contributes to both the field of Pragmatics and the field of Hospitality Studies. Another fundamental characteristic of the research in my dissertation is the combination of qualitative with quantitative research techniques. While the use of these quantitative techniques is commonplace in the Social Sciences, this is less the case for the field of Pragmatics. As such, my dissertation is innovative in its method.
Leanne Schreurs 