31st International LAUD Symposium

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 16.1735, Thu Jun 02 2005

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Message 1: 31st International LAUD Symposium
Date: 31-May-2005
From: Martin Puetz <Puetzuni-landau.de>
Subject: 31st International LAUD Symposium


Full Title: 31st International LAUD Symposium

Date: 27-Mar-2006 - 30-Mar-2006
Location: Landau, Germany
Contact Person: Martin Puetz
Meeting Email: Puetzuni-landau.de


Theme:
Intercultural Pragmatics
- Linguistic, social and cognitive approaches -

Confirmed keynote speaker Professor John Searle University of California,
Berkeley, U.S.A.

Confirmed plenary speakers:  Professor Jan Blommert (Ghent University)
Professor Laurence Horn (Yale University)  Professor Istvan Kecskes (State
University of New York)  Professor Jacob L. Mey (University of Southern
Denmark)  Professor Gnter Radden/Professor Klaus Panther (University of
Hamburg)  Professor Anna Wierzbicka (Australian National University)

Looking back at the past few decades, it seems to me that the theoretical
fog has cleared up somewhat, and that we are now better equipped, and more
critically disposed, to deal with one of the greatest endeavours of the
humanities: intercultural and interlanguage understanding, as a
prerequisite for world-wide human understanding at all levels (Jacob L.
Mey 2004: 45).

Pragmatics as a usage perspective on the language sciences such as
linguistics, the philosophy of language and the sociology of language
essentially focuses on the exploration of language use and the users of
language in real-life situations and, more generally, on the principles
which govern language in everyday interaction. Pragmatics therefore
studies language as realised in interactive contexts and, consequently, as
the creation of meaning in online discourse situations.

At the beginning of this new century we are now witnessing a move away
from overwhelmingly monolingual and monocultural research paradigms to a
type of research which finds its research objectives in the multilingual
and multicultural interaction of speakers from different national, ethnic,
and racial backgrounds. Thus in the era of globalization, communication is
doomed to become increasingly intercultural because it involves
interactants who have different cultures, different conceptualisations,
and different first languages, and who use a grammatically common language
or lingua franca, but a pragmatically highly diversified instrument of
communication representing, not only different cultures, but also
different norms and values.

This link between the tradition of pragmatics and research in
intercultural and inter-language communication has now led to and has been
profiled as the new research area of 'Intercultural Pragmatics', which
explores the interaction between insights from pragmatics and from
intercultural communication, all in relation to the roles and functions of
language and communication in a world-wide communication network.

The goal of the symposium is to promote the understanding of intercultural
competence by focussing on theoretical and applied pragmatics research
that involves the use or the recognition of more than one language or
language variety in a multilingual context and which extends to related
disciplines such as language philosophy, communication science,
psychology, sociology, anthropology, cognitive linguistics, second
language acquisition, and bilingualism. The newly founded journal
''Intercultural Pragmatics'' (2004) is the first dedicated, international
and multidisciplinary outlet for research in pragmatics and intercultural
communication from these diverse fields of study.

We invite (i) papers on pragmatics with a clear intercultural focus (i.e.
interaction among speakers from different cultures), but also (ii) papers
which use a monolingual framework with important 'intercultural'
ramifications.

In particular, we invite abstracts on topics related to the following
conference theme sessions:

Theme session 1: Text-linguistic dimensions of intercultural pragmatics.

* investigates pragmatic features encoded by linguistic forms, i.e.
linguistic pragmatics.

-Theory of intentionality
-Indirect speech acts and illocutionary force
-Situation-bound utterances in L1 and L2
-Pragmatic functions of discourse markers (e.g. politeness phenomena)
-Metapragmatic awareness
-Conventional /conversational implicatures
-Explicit and implicit communication
-The dynamic model of meaning (DMM): mono- and multilingual
meaning-construction
and comprehension
-Relevance Theory

Theme session 2: Social/anthropological dimensions of intercultural
pragmatics

* investigates communication across societies and cultures, i.e. socio-
and ethnopragmatics.

-The dynamic nature of communication, culture and meaning
-Empirical speech acts research: speech acts in interaction
-Ethnographic approaches to language and culture
-Communicative repertoires in cross-cultural comparison
-'Language ideologies': culture-and society-specific views of
communication
-Gender relations and gender discourses
-Ethnic style and 'cultural crossing': switching into ethnically marked
varieties
-'Common ground' in discourse and social interaction
-Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) and cultural scripts

Theme session 3: Cognitive-linguistic dimensions of intercultural
pragmatics

* investigates the conceptual aspects of language use within the
theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, i.e. cognitive pragmatics.

-The interaction of language, culture and cognition in communication
-Culture-specific conceptualizations in a lingua franca
-Sense-extension in terms of the experiential bases of language (as an
alternative to the received Lakoffian perspective of image-schema
transformations and metaphor)
-Sense-extension related to a usage-based/pragmatic perspective
-The fundamental metonymic properties of thought (as more basic than
metaphor?)
-Metonymic models and metonymically-based inferences in speech acts and
other
constructions (e.g. hedged performatives)
-The development of inferencing and implicature systems in language and
conceptualization
-The pragmatic use of grammatical constructions and constructional meaning
-Cultural and cognitive models in communication and thought
-Contextualized perception and the notion of 'embodiment' as applied to
pragmatics

Theme session 4: Interlanguage pragmatics and bilingualism

* investigates the development and use of pragmatic competence by
non-native speakers and explores the mind that operates more than one
language.

-Cultural norms and values of the target culture
-Pragmatic development in a second language
-The 'intercultural' learner as mediator between cultures
- Bilingual resources in classroom peer group talk: codeswitching and code
choice
-Ethnography and cultural awareness activities
-Contrastive rhetoric: cross-cultural aspects of second-language writing
-Differences in the conceptual backgrounds of interlocutors (and resulting
difficulties in comprehension)
- 'Blended mental spaces' and the bilingual mind
- Discourse-completion tasks: cross-cultural correspondences

Conference Format

The conference will run over four days. In addition to six to eight
plenary lectures which will each last for one hour, there will be general
theme sessions, consisting of 30 minute parallel presentations.

Conference Fees

The conference fee is the equivalent of EUR 75 payable on arrival.

Submission of Abstracts: deadline of submission July 31, 2005

Submissions are solicited for theme session presentations which should
last for 20-25 minutes with 5-10 minutes for questions. All submissions
for presentations should follow the abstract guidelines below.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words (about one page) should be submitted
via email to Martin Puetz:  < Puetzuni-landau.de >

Abstracts must be in 12 point font and submitted as an email attachment.
The abstracts will be subject to anonymous peer-review. The preferred
format for sending abstracts is in Word, RTF or PDF.

Please state the following as the subject line of the email to which the
abstract is attached:

abstract - (your name) - LAUD 2006.

Your abstract should include the following information: name, affiliation,
email address, talk title. Please also state for which of the 4 theme
sessions of the symposium your contribution is intended:

Theme session 1: Text-linguistic dimensions of intercultural pragmatics

Theme session 2: Social/anthropological dimensions of intercultural
pragmatics

Theme session 3: Cognitive-linguistic dimensions of intercultural
pragmatics

Theme session 4: Interlanguage pragmatics and bilingualism

Notification of acceptance will be given by 15 August 2005. A first draft
version of your paper should be submitted by November 1, 2005, which will
be anonymously reviewed and, if accepted, pre-published by LAUD and
distributed to all participants before April 2006.

Selected papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings.

Abstract submission deadline:
31 July 2005

The conference will be held at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Campus
Landau (in Landau in der Pfalz, one hour from Frankfurt, Germany)

Conference Organizer:
Martin Ptz Puetzuni-landau.de

Organising committee members:
Ren Dirven, Anne Hoyer, Istvan Kecskes, Iris Kleinbub, Susanne Niemeier,
Christine Peter, Martin Ptz, Ulrich Schmitz.