28.2908, Calls: Anth Ling, Applied Ling, Discipline of Ling, Semantics, Socioling/France

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2908. Mon Jul 03 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2908, Calls: Anth Ling, Applied Ling, Discipline of Ling, Semantics, Socioling/France

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Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2017 15:41:17
From: Angelina Aleksandrova [aleksandrova.a at free.fr]
Subject: Naming the Human: Description, Categorisation, Issues at Stake: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach

 
Full Title: Naming the Human: Description, Categorisation, Issues at Stake: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach 

Date: 10-Jan-2018 - 12-Jan-2018
Location: Strasbourg, France 
Contact Person: Angelina Aleksandrova
Meeting Email: nhuma at sciencesconf.org

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics; Discipline of Linguistics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 03-Sep-2017 

Meeting Description:

Naming the human:description, categorisation, issues at stake. A
multi-disciplinary approach.

Multi-disciplinary conference organised by:

LiLPa (Research Laboratory EA 1339: Linguistics, Languages, Speech)& DRES
(Joint Research Centre UMR 7354 – Law, Religion, Enterprise, Society

January 10-12 2018, Strasbourg University, France

Every day, we encounter lexical items which designate humans: neologisms of
every kind abound, coming either from the media (ranging from migrants to
workaholics, to brexitiens), or from companies such as the French Railways,
for instance, which has updated the noun attendant, an old term for a class of
craftsmen accompanying postulants for the French “compagnonnage” or skilled
workers’ guild (as opposed to qualified and fully-fledged “compagnons”). There
are numerous means of designating humans, which exploit diverse noun
categories: in addition to proper nouns, which have already been widely
studied, these include specific common nouns (see above), but also nouns of
wider scope, such as man, person, individual, etc.

The aim of this conference, jointly organised by linguists and jurists, is to
confront specialists from different disciplinary fields, interested in the
questions of designating people by common nouns, from the origin of the
terminology to the analysis of the linguistic and social functions of the
names attributed to humans, and to their objectives and applications.


Call for Papers: 

Every scientific discipline has to create or/and use designations referring to
humans, as well as wider “categories of people” (variously called
socio-professional categories, moral taxonomy, psychological types, legal
categories, etc.), for various purposes: thus sociologists have invented an
extensive system for classifying social groups for the purpose of population
census (cf research by A. Desrosières & L. Thévenot, 1988 ; C. Brousse, 2010
); doctors and psychologists have done likewise to identify pathologies and
optimise treatment, as have specialists in pedagogy and didactics, for
learner-profiling; IT specialists have elaborated ontologies for the automatic
processing of proper names for places, structures and people, and literary
scholars have established their own categories to apprehend the notion of
literary genre using, inter alia, the evolving concept of character.

As far as law is concerned, legal categories are fundamental to grasping
reality. At the heart of any legal reasoning, they are utilised in order to
determine the rules applicable to de facto situations, and thus form an
essential part of the process of legal characterisation. A prime example is
the noun “travailleur” (worker), which can correspond to several categories:
either “salaried worker/employees” or “self-employed worker”. The delineation
of these categories is, however, put to the test by social reality (which
classification applies to the “auto-entrepreneur”, teleworker, or user of a
collaborative platform?). Far from simply being a technical operation, such
categorisation reflects a certain representation of the individual, and the
prevalence attributed to a system of values. Legal categories can thus be
analysed as having a structuring role in law (cf. M. Cumyn, “Les catégories,
la classification et la qualification juridiques: réflexions sur la
systématicité du droit”, Les Cahiers de droit, vol. 52 n° 3-4, 2011, p.
351-378).

The mission of linguistic science is to elucidate the morpho-syntactic
regularities governing the formation of these lexical units (why “attendant”
and not “attendeur”? What is the difference between “attendant” and
“attentiste”?), the usage adopted in all types of speech events, their meaning
according to context, their historical evolution (the meaning of “attendant”
in the original “compagnonnage” nomenclature and its modern-day use by the
Railway Company), their ideological impact, the underlying lexicalisation
principles, and their equivalents from one linguistic system to another. The
human v. Non-human opposition is not universal, and Lakoff (1986)  has shown
that in some Australian aboriginal languages, human males and females are
dissociated, and classified along with animals for the former and water, fire
and food for the latter.

Finally, the designation of humans is/has been at the core of much discussion,
and has been the central issue of crucial social problems ranging from the
feminisation of names of professions to the titles used in the interests of
political correctness. We may also mention the (bio)-ethical or legal
questions raised by the categorisation – and hence the designation – of embryo
 and certain animals as persons, not forgetting the research involving the
human being , which, in addition to philosophical concepts (perhaps even
subsuming the notion of death itself), call into question the very definition
of what is human.

While the denomination of humans is a highly significant language phenomenon,
which undeniably represents a trans-disciplinary preoccupation,
multi-disciplinary approaches and research are not widespread. With the
exception of one conference entitled “Noms de métiers et catégories
professionnelles (Acteurs, pratiques, discours (XVe siècle à nos jours)” ,
involving historians, sociologists statisticians, linguists and literary
specialists), we do not know of any other attempt at confronting approaches,
at “crossing perspectives” as the saying goes, on the question of the
denomination of humans.

The conference thus aims to include presentations relating to the denomination
of persons, the origin of such denominations, the analysis of the linguistic
and social functions of the names given, and to their objectives and
applications, with a view to answering the following questions:

- What are the reasons underlying the creation of denominations for humans?
- On what does the classification of the human into different disciplinary
categories depend?
- What brings together or keeps apart specialised/erudite denominations and
their common denominations?
- Do the categorisations of people in the various fields of the Humanities and
Social Sciences share any homology, or at least common threads?
- To what functions and applications do the denominations and categorisations
of people correspond?
- What are the historical perspectives on the evolution of the designation of
humans? (how do globalisation and internationalisation influence the
denomination of people and the perception of categories?)

The conference will welcome proposals which may shed new light on the
question, with the potential to interrogate and articulate a set of
disciplines, and even suggest tools or applications of an inter-disciplinary
nature. Presentations may be descriptions of the use, evolution, etc. of the
vocabulary used to name humans, the elaboration of classificatory approaches,
more theoretical approaches, or those of a more applied nature. Contributions
may concern diverse languages.

In today’s context, given the socio-political situation (migratory phenomena,
communitarian debates, the recurrent questions around gender equality) and the
mediatisation and instrumentalisation of the process of naming humans, the
theme of this conference is particularly appropriate, and crucial to
understanding what is at stake in grasping the relationship with the other,
and to revealing the clichés and stereotypes underpinning the representation
of the other through the process of naming, instrumentalising, and mediatising
minorities.

Submitting contributions:
Communications should last 20-25 minutes (plus 5-10 minutes discussion).

Format for propositions:
An abstract of maximum 4 pages (bibliography included), anonymous and in pdf
format, will be deposited on the dedicated symposium platform at the following
address: https://nhuma.sciencesconf.org/ 
If you do not wish to create an account on the platform, it is possible to
send the abstract (anonymous) in pdf to nhuma at sciencesconf.org specifying in
the mail: Last Name, First Name, Discipline, Laboratory, University, City,
Country as well as the keywords accompanying your proposal.

Calendar:
New Deadline:
- Date for submission: September 3th 2017
- Date of notification: October 2th 2017

Working Languages:
French and English

Contact:
nhuma at sciencesconf.org 

Plenary conferences:
- Stefan Goltzberg, Jurist, Philosopher of law and Linguist (Perelman Center,
Brussels)
- Cécile Leguy, Anthropologist (Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3)
- Bruno MaureIlle, Paleoanthropologist (Research Director, CNRS, University of
Bordeaux)
- François Ost, Jurist and Philosopher of law (Saint-Louis University,
Brussels)
- Jean-François Sablayrolles, Lexicologist (Professor, Paris 13 University –
Villetaneuse)
- Zhengdao Ye, Linguist & Translation Studies specialist (The Australian
National University, Acton, Australia)

Round-Table Debates :
- Jean-François Dortier, Sociologue, Fondateur du  Magazine “Sciences
humaines”
- Sylvie Monjean Decaudin, Cergy-Pontoise Univversity (France)
- Pierre-Yves Verkindt, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University (France)
- Éliane Viennot, Iuf & Saint-Etienne University (France)




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