[Lingtyp] Call for applications - Spring School "Speech matters 2" - Italy, May 2026

[Andrea Sansò]

Dear all,

please find below the call for applications for the second edition of the
Spring School "Speech matters", to be held in Como, Italy, May 19-22 2026.

Lecturers include: Caterina Mauri (University of Bologna), Pavel Ozerov
(Innsbruck University), Stefano Manfredi (French National Centre for
Scientific Research), Yaron Matras (Aston Institute for Forensic
Linguistics), Bernardo Magnini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)

Information about the program and the lecturers can be found here:
https://spma.lakecomoschool.org/

Best wishes,
Andrea

***
*DESCRIPTION*
This School is the second edition of Speech matters, which was successfully
held at Villa del Grumello in May 2022, attracting around forty
participants from a variety of international backgrounds. Building on the
positive experience and feedback of the first edition, this new edition
aims to further strengthen the dialogue between sociolinguistics,
computational linguistics, linguistic typology, language documentation, and
corpus-based approaches by exploring how recent methodological advances can
foster greater integration across these fields.

The first edition of the School was grounded in the idea that spoken
language offers an essential vantage point for rethinking current models of
‘standard’ grammar. Such models have often paid limited attention to spoken
data, aside from occasional acknowledgments that specific patterns may
diverge from those found in written or standardized language. This neglect
of the spoken modality reflects more the historical assumptions about what
a grammarian should study than any inherent limitation of grammatical
models themselves in accounting for speech and extended discourse. As a
result, insights from research on spoken language – across fields like
sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics, and discourse analysis – are
seldom incorporated into broader models of human communication, despite
their potential to reshape our understanding of grammar. These insights are
also relevant for speech technologies, whose effectiveness depends heavily
on access to realistic, task-specific training data and on accurate
modeling of spoken interaction.

Indeed, in speech, not all linguistic choices are equally probable.
Speakers tend to select structures and patterns that are well-suited to the
spoken modality, whether due to cognitive efficiency or social
appropriateness. This gives rise to cross-linguistically recurrent features
that can be described as modality-specific constraints – i.e., features
that consistently appear in spoken texts across different languages. These
are not simply a consequence of the vocal-auditory channel but rather
emerge from the complex semiotic and communicative conditions in which
spoken discourse typically unfolds. They often involve linguistic or
discourse features with a high yield factor, that is, elements optimized to
support both the production and comprehension of speech.

The School aims to bring together scholars working on spoken language from
diverse perspectives, with the goal of fostering dialogue among disciplines
such as linguistic typology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, prosodic
analysis, and natural language processing. The novelty of this initiative
lies precisely in its commitment to promoting meaningful
cross-fertilization among fields that share spoken language as their
primary object of study, but that often rely on distinct methodologies and
pursue different research aims.

*APPLICATION*

The School will be open to 40 qualified and selected students.

Registration fee: 180 euros (VAT 22% included). The fee covers all
lectures, course materials, Wi-Fi connection, lunches & coffee breaks. The
fee does NOT cover accommodation and travel.

*HOW TO APPLY*: Prospective participants have to fill out and submit the
form below, and upload a 1-page letter (PDF) organized as follows:

name, department/university, current position (PhD student, postdoc, other)
educational background
research activity and interests
motivations for participating in the school

Please note that any page after the first one will be automatically deleted.

The school is especially addressed to doctoral students and young
postdoctoral scholars. A limited number of senior students (e.g.,
assistant/associate/full professors) can be admitted if they provide
convincing motivation in their application letter.

*Deadlines*:

Student application: 16 February 2026 (firm deadline)
Notification of acceptance: 2 March 2026
Registration and payment for accepted students: 16 March 2026
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