29.1285, Calls: Comp Ling, Historical Ling, Pragmatics, Socioling, Text/Corpus Ling/Belgium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1285. Wed Mar 21 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1285, Calls: Comp Ling, Historical Ling, Pragmatics, Socioling, Text/Corpus Ling/Belgium

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Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 18:45:50
From: Andrea Pizarro Pedraza [andrea.pizarro at uclouvain.be]
Subject: CL Perspectives to Morality and Political Correctness

 
Full Title: CL Perspectives to Morality and Political Correctness 

Date: 13-Dec-2018 - 14-Dec-2018
Location: Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 
Contact Person: Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
Meeting Email: andrea.pizarro at uclouvain.be

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Apr-2018 

Meeting Description:

Session: Cognitive linguistic perspectives to morality and political
correctness: Construal and categorization in context
Convenors: Andrea Pizarro Pedraza & Eline Zenner

Our times are characterized by an increasing sensitivity towards the
correctness of public discourses. Be it in advertising, teaching, in the media
or in institutional communication, public discourses are (often also legally)
required to be politically correct (Allan & Burridge 2006: 90 et seq.; Reutner
& Schafroth 2013); they need to be formulated in ways that are not offensive
towards certain aspects of reality or groups of people, especially those that
are considered to be in a situation of disadvantage. 

This sensitivity is amongst others translated in specific linguistic
regulations in the communication protocols of corporations and governments.
Such regulations prescribe linguistic uses that are supposed to reflect
equality (such as gender neutral expressions) and promote morality, by
avoiding offensive terms (such as address terms). At the same time, our
interactions through social media are characterized by very strong language
use, polarizing highly sensitive debates on sensitive ethical topics (see e.g.
Nobota et al. 2016 for a NLP perspective). Likewise, offensive advertising
draws from recipients’ shocked reactions at political incorrectness for
positively effecting consumer cognitions (e.g. Ilicic & Blakemore 2015, Dore
2018).

The reasoning behind both the promotion of non-offensive language use and the
conscious exploitation of offensive language use is that the choices made on
the lexical level will have an effect on the mental categorization of the
referred realities; using politically correct words will lead to more ethical
thinking (see the discussion about PC-language and essentialism in Janicki
2006:108), using linguistic taboos (viz. “the things we cannot say”) draw
attention.

>From a Cognitive Linguistic perspective, interesting questions are raised
concerning the connection and tension between construal and categorization,
between language and cognition, between linguistic taboo and moral judgement.

This tension lies at the heart of this theme session proposal, which adopts an
interdisciplinary perspective to various questions, including:

- How can we measure the relationship between the lexicalization of taboo
concepts and their mental categorization? Does the use of political
correctness construals guarantee a more ethical categorization? Or vice versa,
does the use of offensive language imply a lack of moral sensitivity? What is
the role of concept frequency alongside lexicalization in the promotion of
political correctness?
- What are the effects of bi- and multilingualism on the perception of
political correctness construals? Are speakers for example more sensitive to
offensiveness in their L1 than in their L2, or how strongly can linguistic
taboo motivate borrowing from foreign languages (see e.g. Curnow 2001, Dewaele
2010)?
- As linguistic taboos are context-dependent, how can we measure their
variation across time, space, and cultures (see e.g. Dewaele 2015)? 
- How do we analyse the cultural variation of prototypically insulting terms
(Janicki 2006:114)?
- What are the social meanings of more and less taboo lexicalizations of taboo
concepts, in fields such as sexuality, migration, race? 
- What are the effects of (non-)offensive discourse on the hearers’ judgments
or perceptions and how important is context and construal for these
evaluations?


Call for Papers:

Theme session: Cognitive linguistic perspectives to morality and political
correctness: Construal and categorization in context
Conveners: Andrea Pizarro Pedraza & Eline Zenner
Conference: CogLing Days (https://cogling2018.wordpress.com/)

We invite abstract submissions of max. 500 words (including references) that
inlude the main research question(s), methodology, data and (expected)
results. The conference languages are Dutch, French or English.

Abstracts should be sent to: andrea.pizarro at uclouvain.be and
eline.zenner at kuleuven.be with the subject ''CogLing Days submission''.

Important dates: 

- Submission of abstracts to the conveners: April 10
- Notification of inclusion in the session: April 15
- Final abstract submission through EasyChair:  before May 15
- Notification of acceptance: July 2




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