Valeria Sinkeviciute

Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland, and Convenor of the Applied Linguistics Program. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Antwerp in 2016 with the thesis “It’s never meant to be offensive…”: an analysis of jocularity and (im)politeness in Australian and British cultural contexts, MA in Linguistics from Vilnius University in 2010 on cross-cultural pragmatics in Canadian English and Québécois, and BA from Vilnius University in 2008 on politeness in British English and Peninsular Spanish first encounters. Her research specializations lie in pragmatics and discourse analysis, particularly the pragmatics of social interaction (face-to-face and online), identity construction, conversational humour, (im)politeness, getting acquainted, and family talk. She works with naturally-occurring conversations, reality television discourse, qualitative interviews, corpora, and social media. Currently, she leads the AusFamTalk project, Family talk in multilingual Australia.

Sinkeviciute published the monograph Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction (John Benjamins, 2019). Key publications include 'The ‘parent’ category as an interactional resource in a sibling dispute over sharing' (Discourse Studies, 2025), 'Multimodal joint fantasising as a category-implicative and category-relations-implicative action in online multi-party interaction' (Internet Pragmatics, 2024), 'Teasing' in Handbook of Pragmatics (John Benjamins, 2022), and 'Conversational humour' in The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She co-edited special issues such as The pragmatics of initial interactions (Journal of Pragmatics, 2021) and Conversational humour (Language & Communication, 2017). She serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Pragmatics, Editorial Board member of Advances in (Im)politeness Studies (Springer), and IPrA Consultation Board member. Sinkeviciute is a member of the European Science Foundation College of Experts (from 2021) and FWO Review College (2024-2027), and holds a 2025 fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim. She has delivered masterclasses on pragmatic and interactional competence and participated in radio panel discussions.

Professional Email: v.sinkeviciute@uq.edu.au