[Corpora-List] Conference: Keyness in Text

[John Sinclair]

KEYNESS IN TEXT

Certosa di Pontignano,
University of Siena
26th- 30th June 2007


FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
Some things are more important than others, and one of the most valuable 
skills is the ability to evaluate experience along this dimension. For 
this conference, the dimension we want to focus on is KEYNESS IN TEXT 
applied to documents and speech events. We are equally concerned with 
the techniques, methods and criteria that are used to determine keyness 
as with the results of the exercise of keyness skills.

There are many different approaches to the concept of keyness. The 
conference will focus on three main ones. One is an approach from a 
background of cultural studies and the history of ideas, where the 
notions that shape the society are studied, such as in Raymond Williams’ 
seminal work 1976. Another approach is from lexical and lexicographical 
studies, both contemporary and historical, where the task of definition 
requires the perception and the selection of key concepts. Another is 
from the computational examination of texts, in the style of 
text-mining, the identification of certain words based on their 
frequency distribution and clustering in a document. On the more 
practical level, there is a widely established convention on the 
internet and in academic publication of requiring the originator of a 
document to provide keywords, which are then used in classification and 
search strategies. Quite often, however, the identification of aboutness 
in a given text requires a phraseological perspective.

Keyness is an essential component in almost all forms of education; the 
ability to digest substantial amounts of input material and pick out the 
important issues is specifically taught in language classes under 
headings like summarisation, in all kinds of subjects. Contributions to 
the conference are encouraged that consider all kinds of treatment of 
the concept of keyness in theory and applications with particular 
emphasis to language teaching for Special Purposes. Particular attention 
will also be devoted to the automatic identification of keyness. 
Software demonstrations are encouraged.

The conference welcomes submissions on any of these approaches to 
keyness, in particular the following themes will be considered:
The concept of keyness in relation to:
* Specialized discourse
* Text and genre analysis
* Multilingualism and contrastive approaches
* Translation
* The cultural dimension
* The cognitive dimension
* Text-mining and data-mining
* Diachronic perspectives
* Spoken/written language
* Pedagogical aspects in EFL, EAP and LSP
* Lexis and Lexicography
* Terminology and Terminography

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Omar Calabrese, University of Siena
François Rastier, CNRS, Paris
Mike Scott, University of Liverpool
Mike Stubbs, University of Trier
Martin Warren, Hong Kong Polytechnic

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Elena Tognini Bonelli, Università di Siena
Anna Lazzari, Università di Siena

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Marina Bondi, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Gabriella Del Lungo, Università di Firenze
Julia Bamford, Università di Roma La Sapienza
Marina Dossena, Università di Bergamo
Elena Tognini Bonelli, Università di Siena

For further details please refer to:
http://www.disas.unisi.it/keyness/index.php