Fwd: CfP: Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence. An international colloquium on meaning and human expression

[Alejandro Paz]

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	CfP: Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence. An 
international colloquium on meaning and human expression
Date: 	Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:18:00 +0200
From: 	Ulla Savolainen <ulla.savolainen at helsinki.fi>
To: 	ulla.savolainen at helsinki.fi, ulla.savolainen at helsinki.fi 
<ulla.savolainen at helsinki.fi>



Call for Papers

Register II:  Emergence, Change and Obsolescence

An international colloquium on meaning and human expression
22nd-24th May 2013, Helsinki, Finland

'Register' originated as a term in linguistics for contextual
variation in language, or language as it is used in a particular
communicative situation.  This term and concept has become important
for addressing communication through practice in several intersecting
disciplines, such as folkloristics, linguistics and linguistic
anthropology, being used with varying fields of inclusion and
exclusion, ranging from the purely verbal
level of communication to all features which have the capacity to
signify (props, gestures, etc.). The Helsinki Register colloquia have
been organized to bring together representatives of diverse
perspectives in order to open cross-disciplinary discussion of the
term and concept ?register?.

Register II sets out to explore interfaces of social, societal and
semiotic processes that a) give rise to registers as meaningful
constellations of communicative features; b) affect existing registers
and their constituent features; and c) lead registers to become
obsolete for certain functions or to drop out of use.  We invite
presentations on both synchronically oriented research and on
long-term historical perspectives; on rapidly developing or
short-lived registers (e.g. school-yard slang, "facebookese") as well
as on
registers characterized by social stability and slow-changing
structures (e.g. "Biblical" language, oral epic singing).  We hope
that diverse presentations from different disciplinary perspectives on
the life of registers as social practice will prove reciprocally
informative and produce new insights and understandings.

Keynote speakers:

- Douglas Biber, Regents? Professor of Applied Linguistics, Northern
Arizona University, USA

- Charles Briggs, Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore and
Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

- Ruqaiya Hasan, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Macquarie
University, Australia

- Timo Kaartinen, Adjunct Professor of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, University of Helsinki, Finland

- Lars Boje Mortensen, Professor of Cultural History of Antiquity and
the Middle Ages,
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

If you would like to take part in this event by presenting a paper,
please send an abstracts of no more than 500 words to Ulla Savolainen
(ulla.savolainen[a]helsinki.fi) by Friday, 30th November 2012.

Papers presentations should be twenty minutes in length allowing ten
minutes for discussion and accessible to participants from other
fields for cross-disciplinary discussion.  If you would like to
participate without presenting a paper, please let us know by March
15th, and also whether you would be interested in moderating a
session. A participation fee of 50 euros covers lunches and receptions.

Organizers:
- Folklore Studies of the University of Helsinki
- The research project Oral and Literary Culture in the Medieval and
Early Modern Baltic Sea Region of the Finnish Literature Society

For more information, please visit our website at:
http://www.helsinki.fi/folkloristiikka/register/