[Lingtyp] Spring School "Speech matters" - Como (Italy), 16-20 May 2022

[Andrea Sansò]

***APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING***

Dear all,

The Spring School "Speech matters" will take place in Como (Italy), May
16-20, 2022. Applications are accepted until March 11. Please find below a
detailed description of the school.

Best wishes,
Andrea Sansò

***

Speech matters
Website: http://spma.lakecomoschool.org

Dates: 16-May-2022 - 20-May-2022
Location: Como, Lombardia, Italy
Focus: speech, linguistic theory, prosody, typology
Minimum Education Level: MA

Special Qualifications:
The school will be of interest to PhD candidates and Postdocs working on
various fields having to do with spoken language

Description:
The systematic study of spoken language has not, until recently, been
associated with models that focus on describing ‘grammar’, which are
generally based on the written language. The bulk of such models has not
been particularly concerned with analyzing spoken data beyond noting,
occasionally, that a specific pattern may have different instantiations in
spoken language from what it has in ‘standard’ grammar.

This bias away from spoken language, however, reflects more the traditional
understanding of what a grammarian ought to study than any intrinsic
limitation of grammatical models with respect to their applicability to the
study of spoken data and to larger stretches of discourse as the domain of
analysis. As a result, the insights stemming from research on spoken
language data in fields such as sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics
and discourse analysis are not generally subsumed by models of human
communication, although they have the potential to change our view of
grammar, with crucial consequences also for speech technologies. The
success of the latter, indeed, crucially depends on the creation of
realistic training data appropriate to the task that is to be carried out,
and on their appropriate modelling.

When we speak, indeed, not every linguistic choice is equally probable. As
speakers, we tend to use structures and patterns that better fit the needs
of the spoken modality because of their efficiency or social adequacy. This
determines the cross-linguistic ubiquity of features that can be considered
as modality-specific constraints, i.e. features occurring in spoken texts
of different languages. These modality-specific constants do not only
depend on the use of the vocal-auditory channel, but also on the complex
semiotic and communicative conditions in which spoken texts are typically
produced, and consist in discourse or linguistic features with a high yield
factor, i.e. elements optimized to facilitate the production and the
reception of speech.

The aim of this School is to bring together scholars working on spoken
language data from different angles, with a view to building bridges among
different fields such as linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, discourse
analysis, prosodic analysis, and speech technologies. The novelty of the
school lies precisely in this effort to paving the way for a more fruitful
interaction among disciplinary fields that share the object of analysis
(spoken language) but approach it with different methodologies and with
different goals in mind, and that do not often cross-fertilize each other.

The school will comprise five courses and three labs:

Course 1: “From speech to grammar” (Prof. Miriam Voghera, Università di
Salerno)

Course 2: “Crosslinguistic study of reference production and argument
structure in spoken-language discourse” (Prof. Stefan Schnell, Universität
Zürich)

Course 3: “Speech as a symbolic resource in different types of speaker
communities” (Prof. Miriam Meyerhoff, All Souls College, University of
Oxford)

Course 4: “Prosody, gesture, and conversation: multiple communicative
systems and the organization of interaction” (Prof. Margaret Zellers,
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel)

Course 5: “Methods of speech synthesis with an emphasis on articulatory
synthesis” (Prof. Peter Birkholz, Technische Universität Dresden)

Lab 1: The use of softwares in language documentation: transcribing and
annotating spoken corpora (Prof. Eugenio Goria, Università di Torino);

Lab 2: Doing prosodic analysis – An introduction (Dr. Riccardo Orrico,
Università di Napoli);

Lab 3: Identifying and describing procedural items in discourse: the case
of discourse markers (Prof. Ilaria Fiorentini, Università di Pavia; Prof.
Andrea Sansò, Università dell’Insubria).

This event is supported by the Department of Human Sciences (Disuit) of the
University of Insubria.

Tuition: 150 EURO

Tuition Explanation: Each course will comprise from 3 to 4 lectures.
Tuition fees include all courses as well as coffee and lunch breaks.

Contact Person: Andrea Sansò
                Email: andrea.sanso at uninsubria.it

Deadlines:
Application submission: March 11th, 2022
Notification of acceptance: March 21st, 2022
Registration and payment: April 4th, 2022


-- 
Andrea Sansò
Presidente del Consiglio di Corso di Studi
Scienze della Mediazione Interlinguistica e Interculturale
Professore Associato
Glottologia e Linguistica (L-LIN/01)
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e dell'Innovazione per il Territorio
Università dell'Insubria
Via M.E. Bossi 5, Como
I-22100
Associate Editor - Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
<http://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it>
https://uninsubria.academia.edu/AndreaSansò
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20220210/1bf0b9a3/attachment.htm>