Christine Béal, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and Véronique Traverso, Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France) 

www.univ-montp3.fr/praxiling/spip.php?article24&lang=fr
icar.univ-lyon2.fr/membres/vtraverso/index.htm
Véronique Traverso is Director of Research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), in the ICAR Lab (ICAR, "Interaction Corpora, Apprenticeship Representations"), which is dedicated to the study of spoken interaction. She teaches conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, corpora of Spoken French at the University Lumière Lyon 2.
Her work is grounded in a detailed analysis of talk-in-interaction, taking into account the large range of the resources (verbal, prosodic, gestural) that are used by participants in order to communicate during ordinary as well as working activities. It is based on naturally occurring data (audio/video-recorded in social situations). The data is collected from a variety of settings (from ordinary conversation during visits to talk at work — medical consultations, meetings, services), mainly in French, but also in Arabic, as well as multilingual exchanges.

Christine Béal is Professor of Linguistics at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and a member of Praxiling, a CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) Research Lab specialising in Linguistics and Communication. She first taught English in France, then French as a foreign language in the United States and Australia. She currently teaches French linguistics, interactional linguistics and cross-cultural pragmatics in the Département de Sciences du Langage.
Her work is based on naturally occurring data (spontaneous talk between colleagues at the office, work meetings, job interviews, talk among friends) as well as talk in the media, both in French and English. From a cross-cultural perspective, she has focussed more specifically on terms of address, speech acts and the theory of politeness, rituals and routines, turn-taking and the management of conversation and, more recently, conversational humour.