FW: Colloquium PRAGMATIC INTERFACES

[Ruth Wodak]

For your information
Apologies for multiple postings

International colloquium PRAGMATIC INTERFACES
University of Geneva, February 12-14, 2004

Conference announcement

AIM

The colloquium aims at addressing a range of issues relating to the possible
and impossible relations between current and competing approaches in
pragmatics and discourse analysis.

SCIENTIFIC COORDINATION

Louis de Saussure & Peter Schulz
University of Geneva / University of Lugano

SPEAKERS

Nicholas ALLOTT (London)
Nicholas ASHER (Austin)
Antoine AUCHLIN (Geneva)
Alain BERRENDONNER (Fribourg)
Diane BLAKEMORE (Salford)
Robyn CARSTON (London)
Paul CHILTON (Norwich)
Paul DANLER (Innsbruck)
Marc DOMINICY (Brussels)
Laurent FILLIETTAZ (Geneva)
Hans KAMP (Stuttgart)
Jacques MOESCHLER (Geneva)
Andrea ROCCI (Lugano)
Louis de SAUSSURE (Geneva)
Peter SCHULZ (Lugano)
Frans VAN EEMEREN (Amsterdam / New York)
Daniel VANDERVEKEN (Québec)
Deirdre WILSON (London)
Ruth WODAK (Vienna)


TOPICS

Pragmatic theories, although they all focus on language in use, don't only
oppose each-other through methodology and epistemology, but also through
their domain of study.
Some describe social interaction and consider discourse as a document for
that task. Others tackle the cognitive process of interpretation in context.
Others discuss semantic issues in discourse, argumentative processes,
symbolic or semiotic aspects of discourse, or various other psychological
aspects of linguistic practice.
These oppositions result from profound epistemological discrepancies that
show how much the sciences of language are situated at the crossroads of
materialistic naturalistic methodologies and methods in social sciences
(which in turn are all but homogeneous, see the difference between
psychosocial approaches to speech acts and ethnomethodological
conversational pragmatics for example).
It's crucial for the development of pragmatics that researchers focus on
these differences, but also on potential converging lines, and, of course,
to exploit them in the future. Here resides the main objective of the
colloquium.
The main issues addressed by the colloquium are, among others, the
following:
- Is an interface possible between any radical pragmatic theory and any
discourse analysis theory?
- To what extent macro-discursive phenomena can be tackled by radical
pragmatics, in particular discourse organisation, dialogue / interaction,
and literature?
- To what degree of granularity meaning and reasoning integrate into models
in discourse analysis? And what kind of theory of meaning is (potentially)
used by theories in discourse analysis?
- Is there a path towards an interplay between theories that consider
cognition as individual and approaches that assume facts of "collective"
cognition?
- Is it necessary to posit strict limits for each kind of approach, or
should we consider that they are competing on a unique and exclusive domain?
- What are the view of scholars in related fields such as syntax, semantics,
philosophy of language and psychology?

The colloquium will be held in English and French.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

- The conference will take place in auditorium S 160, campus Uni-Mail,
Boulevard Carl-Vogt, Geneva.
- Conference website: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/latl/interfaces/index.html
- Free admission
- Contact person: Mihaela.Popa at lettres.unige.ch

The program of the colloquium will be available on the website in due time.

Louis de Saussure & Peter Schulz
Louis.deSaussure at lettres.unige.ch
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