[Corpora-List] [e-journal Discours] Special issue on ?Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Signalling Text Organisation?

[mad2010 at univ-tlse2.fr]

Special issue on ?Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Signalling Text  
Organisation?
Following MAD 2010 conference

Call for papers

The interdisciplinary journal Discours (http://discours.revues.org/)  
opens a call for papers for a special issue on ?Multidisciplinary  
Perspectives on Signalling Text Organisation?, the theme  of the  
MAD'10 workshop held in March 2010 in Moissac, France  
(http://w3.workshop-mad2010.univ-tlse2.fr/). Workshop participants are  
warmly invited to submit, but this call is open to anyone interested.
MAD stands for Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse. Accordingly,  
this special issue seeks to bring together studies from different  
disciplines interested in discourse and discourse processing:  
linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, educational  
and cognitive psychology, ergonomics and document design, semiotics,  
information and communication sciences, typography, etc.
Signalling text organisation refers to the observation that within  
texts, certain features or elements seem to have a special  
instructional role with regard to text organisation. These text  
organisation signalling devices have been described under a variety of  
names: signals, structure indicators, advance organisers, discourse  
markers, layout properties, surface structure features, organisational  
cues, stylistic writing devices and so on. Their scope ranges from a  
very local level to a more global one. Their nature is also very  
diverse:
1.linguistic: words (e.g. connectives), phrases (e.g. emphasis  
phrases), sentences (meta-discourse sentences) and beyond (overviews,  
summaries);
2.graphic: typographical and spatial variation (e.g. paragraph breaks,  
boldface);
3.hybrid (e.g. enumerations, headings, tables of contents, links and  
pop-up windows in electronic documents);
4.more elusively: first mention, length or repetition of particular  
text units, structural parallelism.
Different disciplines have taken an interest in these devices, either  
as a core object of study or as an element to be taken into account.  
As a consequence, research concerned with the signalling of text  
organisation is far from constituting a unified field. The notion of  
signal itself may be associated with different key concepts according  
to discipline and models: document structure, discourse organisation,  
layout structure, text architecture, etc. As far as function is  
concerned, they may be seen as discourse construction devices, traces  
of metalinguistic segments, as reading or processing instructions, as  
traces of the writer?s cognitive processes, or as cues revealing the  
author?s intentions, etc.
Since the 1970?s, research into the signalling of text organisation  
has produced considerable results. The environment for this research  
is at present undergoing a twofold transformation: first, new methods  
are appearing, linked to technological advances (corpus linguistics,  
natural language processing, eye movement recording techniques for the  
analysis of cognitive processes during reading, etc.); second, new  
fields of application are opening (in connection with the expanding  
use of digital documents in the professional and educational worlds).  
In this new context, novel research questions open up, requiring the  
integration of contributions from different disciplines or fields of  
study.
We invite contributions on topics and questions such as the following  
(the list may be extended):
          - What are text signals and what role do they play?
                 - reader?s viewpoint
                 - writer?s viewpoint
                 - analyst?s viewpoint
          - What may be relevant theoretical models and methods of  
data collection and analysis to study the signalling of text  
organisation and its cognitive effects ?
                - naturalist approaches and corpus studies
                - empirical approaches
                - micro vs. macro approaches
                - inter- and pluridisciplinary approaches
          - Text signals and literacy
          - Text signals in document design, natural language  
processing and language technologies

We welcome different types of contributions: literature reviews,  
theoretical and methodological considerations, reports of empirical  
data, corpus based-studies, etc.


Submission procedure:
         - 6 September 2011: submission of articles for evaluation (  
.doc or .rtf), (articles will be subject to the usual blind-reviewing  
procedure).
         - 30 October 2011: notification of acceptance.
         - 15 December 2011: submission of final versions.
         - June 2012: publication of special issue.


Articles may be written in French or English; the expected length is  
between 40,000 and 60,000 signs (punctuation and spaces included).
For more details, see http://discours.revues.org/index253.html (style  
sheet) and http://discours.revues.org/index358.html (instructions for  
authors).

Articles should be accompanied by an abstract of around 1500  
characters, together with 5 to 8 key words, in English (and, if  
possible, also in French).
Submissions should be sent to mad2010 at univ-tlse2.fr and specify ?MAD  
publication? in the title of the message.

Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley
Marianne Vergez Couret
Lydia-Mai Ho-Dac
Julie Lemarié

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