Michele Zappavigna is a linguist in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. She is interested in how people negotiate social relations through tenor (interpersonal meaning), with a particular focus on digital discourse. Her research applies social semiotic discourse analysis informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics. She is currently working on AI discourse and Large Language Model chatbot conversations.

Over the past decade, her research has developed around a sustained interest in how social life is organised through communication. Her early work examined how knowledge is shaped in interaction, arguing that what we 'know' is constructed through patterns of meaning rather than simply held in the mind. She then turned to institutional settings, analysing restorative justice conferences to understand how apology, remorse, accountability, and repair are negotiated in face-to-face encounters. This research explored how language and paralanguage contribute to rebuilding damaged social relations. Her focus later expanded to digital environments. She investigated how people align, affiliate, and form communities on social media, showing how shared values, evaluation, and features such as hashtags enable people to connect — or to contest one another — in networked publics. More recently, she has extended this trajectory multimodally to include voice, gesture, and emoji, demonstrating that these are central resources for expressing stance, emotion, and social alignment. Across spoken, institutional, and online contexts, her work has moved toward a broader account of how relationships are negotiated through language and other semiotic resources. The arc of this research runs from knowledge, to repair, to affiliation, and toward a comprehensive understanding of how communication shapes and reshapes social relations in contemporary life.