CFP: Register Conference, Helsinki, May 2012

[Jim Wilce]

Call for papers

Register: Intersections of Language, Context and Communication
An international colloquium, 23rd–25th May 2012, Helsinki, Finland.

‘Register’ originated as a term in linguistics for contextual variation 
in language, or language as it is used in a particular communicative 
situation. This term and concept has become important across several 
intersecting disciplines, particularly in discussions of genre and 
approaches to language in written versus oral communication. As a 
consequence, ‘register’ has been used by folklorists, linguists and 
linguistic anthropologists with varying fields of inclusion and 
exclusion, ranging from the purely verbal level of communication to all 
features which have the capacity to signify (props, gestures, etc.). 
Uses of ‘register’ have become highly diversified within the scholarship 
of each field, and the different fields have not opened a discourse with 
one another on this topic. This colloquium is intended to bring together 
representatives of diverse perspectives in order to open 
cross-disciplinary discussion of the term and concept ‘register’.

Keynote speakers:
Asif Agha, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Ruth Finnegan, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Open University, UK
John Miles Foley, Professor of Classical Studies and English, University 
of Missouri, USA
Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology, Northern Arizona University, USA
Susanna Shore, Adjunct Professor of Finnish Language, University of 
Helsinki, Finland

We welcome participant presentations on register and variation from all 
disciplines. Presentations are requested to be accessible to 
participants from other fields and open to cross-disciplinary 
discussion. If you would like to take part in this event by presenting a 
paper, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words to Kaarina 
Koski (kaarina.koski at helsinki.fi) by Friday, 18th November 2011. Papers 
presentations should be twenty minutes in length allowing ten minutes 
for discussion. If you would like to participate without presenting a 
paper, please let us know by the end of February, and also whether you 
would be interested in moderating a session.

The colloquium is organized by Folklore Studies of the University of 
Helsinki and the research project “Oral and Literary Culture in the 
Medieval and Early Modern Baltic Sea Region” of the Finnish Literature 
Society. The event will be held in the Great Hall of the Finnish 
Literature Society (2nd floor, Hallituskatu 1, Helsinki).

-- 
Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology

-- 
Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
Northern Arizona University
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/
Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Now Available: Language and Emotion
For more information see www.cambridge.org/9780521864176