30.4257, Calls: Applied Linguistics, Ling & Literature, Text/Corpus Linguistics/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4257. Sat Nov 09 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4257, Calls: Applied Linguistics, Ling & Literature, Text/Corpus Linguistics/Germany

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Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2019 06:38:20
From: Sofia Rüdiger [sofia.ruediger at uni-bayreuth.de]
Subject: Corpus Approaches to the Language of Science Fiction

 
Full Title: Corpus Approaches to the Language of Science Fiction 

Date: 20-May-2020 - 20-May-2020
Location: Heidelberg, Germany 
Contact Person: Sofia Rüdiger
Meeting Email: sofia.ruediger at uni-bayreuth.de

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Dec-2019 

Meeting Description:

Full Session Title: To boldly go - Corpus approaches to the language of
Science Fiction
Convenors: Claudia Lange & Sofia Rüdiger

Engaging with possible futures is an essential human endeavor and the
popularity of the Science Fiction (SF) genre in general, but also particularly
among linguists, thus does not come as a surprise. SF has the power to
continually shape, stimulate, and challenge contemporary thought and societal
norms, and serves much deeper undertakings than being mere speculative
fiction. 

While being notoriously difficult to define, most writers on Science Fiction
(SF) take Darko Suvin’s by now classic definition of the genre as a reference
point (e.g. Shippey 2007: 15, Adams 2017: 331):
SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are
the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main
formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s
empirical environment. (Suvin 2016[1979]: 20)

Science Fiction texts – which we take to include stories, novels, fan fiction,
video games, TV series, and movies – rely on linguistic “means of
estrangement” listed by Adams (2017: 333ff.) to different degrees. Science
Fiction’s alternative ‘imaginative framework’ comes to life via the creative
use of language and may range from occasional ‘alien’ referring expressions to
the development of fully-fledged artificial languages, with Klingon being the
most iconic and enduring example (Adams 2011, Okrent 2009). 

Whereas previous research on SF has rested mainly on literary and qualitative
approaches, we propose corpus linguistics as a fruitful method to investigate
the language of Science Fiction from new perspectives. Recently published
resources, such as the BYU TV Corpus (2019) and the BYU Movie Corpus (2019),
include ample SF material, offer easy access to telecinematic discourse, and
have yet to be employed for large-scale corpus linguistic research of SF.


Call for Papers:

This workshop is devoted to exploring the language in/of Science Fiction with
corpus linguistic approaches. We would like to raise the following questions
and welcome contributions which explore these and other related issues:

- How can we characterize the language of Science Fiction, concerning
individual authors as well as individual subgenres and text types?
- How has the language of Science Fiction changed over time? Which linguistic
levels contribute most to such change?
- Which corpus linguistic methods lend themselves to an analysis of the
language of Science Fiction (e.g., corpus stylistics, corpus-based approaches
to metaphor)?
- Is it possible to quantify the notion of ‘estrangement’ characterizing
Science Fiction texts?
- In how far has the language of Science Fiction entered popular culture?
- How are linguistic aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) represented in
Science Fiction (e.g., by sentient androids, talking machines, etc., cf.
Epstein et al. (2008))? How does this relate to present day AI developments,
such as chatbots, Alexa, etc.?
- What do corpus linguistic methods contribute to analyzing world building in
SF?
- How can multimodal material be productively included in the corpus-based
analysis of SF texts? 

We explicitly encourage submissions with interdisciplinary approaches to the
language of Science Fiction (e.g., corpus stylistics, corpus-based media
studies, digital humanities).

Please submit your abstract of 500 words (including references) via e-mail to
claudia.lange at tu-dresden.de and sofia.ruediger at uni-bayreuth.de by 15 December
2019. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in mid-January 2020.




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