Call Conference DICMA (Discourse cohesive means in acquisition) ZAS, Berlin, March 2012

[Nadja Kuehn]

Full Title: Discourse cohesive means in acquisition

Location: Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

Start Date: 11.-13.3.2012

Contact: Dagmar Bittner, Nadja Kuehn  (dicma at zas.gwz-berlin.de)

Meeting Website: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/workshop_dicma.html



Meeting Description:

Telling others about complex events, impressions, and thoughts in a coherent
manner is a very demanding task for children up to their teenage years, and,
though less obvious, understanding complex texts produced by others is just
as demanding. The richness, diversity, and complexity of the pragmatic and
linguistic devices that have to be followed in order to produce and
comprehend a coherent discourse make this arguably one of the most
challenging tasks in language acquisition. Children have to figure out the
structure and content of the macro-parts, i.e. who is acting where and when,
what happened and what follows from what happened. In addition, there is a
broad range of linguistic means of discourse cohesion which are, at least
partially, interacting with each other. Most of them are linked to pragmatic
interpretations and to the internal non-linguistic knowledge and emotional
states of the communication partner(s).

The conference will address the micro-level of discourse structure and
present current research on the acquisition of the various phenomena that
ensure coherence in discourse. In order to open our eyes to the complexity
of the domain and the possible interactions between the diverse phenomena,
we invite papers investigating children’s development into discourse
coherence from all angles and perspectives. Currently, the main body of
research focuses on referential expressions with respect to e.g. the
introduction and maintenance of referents, topic-sensitivity, and anaphoric
capacity. More recently, the role of coherence relations expressed by
different types of connectors and the impact of verb semantics in discourse
continuation have become of interest. However, apart from the early studies
from the 1980s, not much work has been done on time reference and
tense/aspect chains in discourse. Little is known about the influence of
epistemic, modal, and several other types of expressions. The same holds for
the influence of context information, the impact of prosodic information,
and the treatment of focus.

The conference provides the opportunity to discuss the broad range of
discourse cohesive means and the methods of their investigation from
different theoretical perspectives. We especially encourage the presentation
of papers focusing on the following aspects:

- correlations and interactions between different types of discourse
cohesive means

- correlations between discourse cohesive means and non-linguistic phenomena
such as emotional states, discourse context, etc.

- the role of theory of mind

- the acquisition of pragmatic implicatures in the use of discourse cohesive
means

- acquisitional milestones and paths in the development of discourse
abilities

- processing of discourse cohesive means

- the interaction of discourse cohesive means with parameters of information
structure

- acquisition in mono- and bilingual children as well as in SLI children



Invited speakers:

Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul

Juhani Järvikivi

Tom Roeper



Abstracts of max. 500 words (not including references) should be sent as a
pdf-file by the 19th of September 2011 to: dicma at zas.gwz-berlin.de

Please provide name(s) of author(s) and affiliation(s) in the text of the
email and do not mention it in the abstract file.

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