28.187, Calls: Cog Sci, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Typology/Australia

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-187. Tue Jan 10 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.187, Calls: Cog Sci, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Typology/Australia

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Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:36:59
From: Alice Gaby [alice.gaby at monash.edu]
Subject: Sociotopography: the Interplay of Language, Culture, and Environment

 
Full Title: Sociotopography: the Interplay of Language, Culture, and Environment 

Date: 15-Dec-2017 - 15-Dec-2017
Location: Canberra, ACT, Australia 
Contact Person: Alice Gaby
Meeting Email: alice.gaby at monash.edu
Web Site: http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/alt-conference-2017/workshops2/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Typology 

Meeting Description:

This workshop explores the interplay of language, culture, and environment
('sociotopography'), especially as it pertains to spatial language. 

Considerable diversity in spatial reference across languages is well attested,
both in the linguistic means by which spatial categories are expressed, and in
the categories themselves (Levinson 2003; Levinson & Wilkins 2006; Pederson et
al. 1998). Spatial relations of any type can be expressed using language.
However, in perhaps all languages some spatial concepts are lexicalised or
expressed in a grammaticized way, while others are relegated to periphrastic
expression. These lexicalized and grammaticized expressions are key to
understanding the extent to which spatial reference displays universal
tendencies, and the extent to which variation is systematic. Although
considerable cross-linguistic diversity exists in spatial categories,
universal tendencies can nonetheless be detected, and salient landscape and
other external-world features seem to play a role in the detail of systems
involving absolute Frame of Reference (FoR) (Palmer 2002, 2015), and even in
FoR choice (see Majid et al. 2004; Bohnemeyer et al. 2014). However, those
aspects of the environment that are perceived as salient vary across cultures,
and the nature of the interaction between humans and their environment plays a
crucial role, as seen in demographic variation within individual languages in
tendencies in FoR choice (e.g. Pederson 1993), and in geocentric versus
egocentric strategies more generally (Palmer et al. 2016). These findings
prompted Palmer et al. (2016) to propose a Sociotopographic Model, which
models the interplay of the physical environment of the language locus,
sociocultural interaction with the environment, and the linguistic repertoire
available to speakers. This workshop seeks to bring together scholars working
in linguistic spatial reference in a diverse range of languages in a diverse
range of environments, in order to explore the extent to which the
Sociotopographic model adequately captures the interplay of the various
linguistic, conceptual and environmental forces at work in linguistic spatial
reference, and the extent to which the model reveals systematic variation in
some of the cross-linguistic diversity observed in this area of language.


Call for Papers:

We invite papers addressing sociotopography from a variety of perspectives,
including:   

- Factors (cultural, linguistic, topographic) influencing conceptual and
linguistic representations of space
- Cross-linguistic and comparative analyses of systems of spatial reference 
- The effect of migration, education and industrialisation on spatial
reference
- How cultural and linguistic knowledge influences navigation, wayfinding and
other aspects of spatial cognition.

Submissions to this workshop should be made through the general ALT2017
abstract submission form:

http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/alt-conference-2017/call-for-abstracts/




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