37.1467, Confs: Hiddentity Concealment and Invisibility: Interdisciplinary Investigations Into the Hidden (Italy)

Fri Apr 17 02:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1467. Fri Apr 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1467, Confs: Hiddentity Concealment and Invisibility: Interdisciplinary Investigations Into the Hidden (Italy)

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Date: 15-Apr-2026
From: Eros Traficante [e.traficante at unior.it]
Subject: Hiddentity Concealment and Invisibility: Interdisciplinary Investigations Into the Hidden

Hiddentity Concealment and Invisibility: Interdisciplinary
Investigations Into the Hidden

Date: 12-Nov-2026 - 13-Nov-2026
Location: Naples, Italy
Contact: Eros Traficante
Contact Email: e.traficante at unior.it
Meeting URL:
https://www.unior.it/it/notizie/hiddentity-occultamento-e-invisibilita-indagini-interdisciplinari-sul-nascosto

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discipline of Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Text/Corpus Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Italian (ita)

Submission Deadline: 15-May-2026

The Graduate Conference at University of Naples L'Orientale aims to
foster an interdisciplinary debate on current and relevant topics. The
2026 edition is titled "Hiddentity Concealment and Invisibility:
Interdisciplinary Investigations Into the Hidden" and investigates the
hidden and its manifestations from multiple perspectives.
The hidden constitutes a fundamental dimension of human experience and
of its cultural, linguistic, and social representations. The “hidden”
emerges as a multidisciplinary interpretive category, inherent in the
analysis of literary, cultural, and linguistic production, ranging
from rhetorical strategies of the unsaid to the dynamics of
concealment within texts, minority linguistic communities, and the
notion of the uncanny in literature and cinema studies. It invites
considerations that allow submerged worlds to come to the surface
through diverse critical categories and analytical approaches.  In the
history of linguistics, the debate over the origins of language has
long been approached primarily through perspectives on sign structures
that delimit communication via explicit lexical rules.
Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that every system contains
elements that are not immediately visible within a text. Research into
the hidden reveals a crucial area of study in the relationship between
language and context, particularly regarding implicature, irony,
deixis, presupposition, and speech acts.
Within linguistic studies, discourse analysis provides an especially
fertile ground for investigating the unsaid and the implicit.
Discursive practices, whether political, institutional, or
media-related, often conceal rhetorical strategies that reflect and
perpetuate power relations. In this vein, advertising discourse,
deeply rooted in the consumerist ethos of post-industrial societies,
frequently relies on subliminal or ambiguous messages to persuade
potential customers. In argumentation and politics, the discursive
ethos (i.e., the image the speaker constructs of themselves within
discourse) may mask further layers of meaning through ambiguous
narratives, generalisations, and stereotypes, thus shaping perceptions
of reality by either favouring or disadvantaging specific
sociocultural groups. Multimodal analysis has further demonstrated how
meaning can also be conveyed through non-verbal channels, which
acquire communicative value as elements of the unexpressed. Within
Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the hidden is not merely synonymous
with what is left unsaid; rather, it manifests itself as a set of
semiotic choices (e.g., visual, verbal, auditory, and structural) that
generate strategic omissions, opacity, and silences capable of
orienting meaning-making processes.
In the context of specialised languages, terminology offers
significant perspectives for exploring the hidden from a variationist
standpoint. Despite attempts to standardise technical and scientific
vocabulary within the Wüsterian tradition, terminological variation
remains predominant at both the textual and discursive levels.
Diachronic studies of specialised languages explore processes of
terminological necrology, whereby terms emerge, change over time, lose
semantic nuances, or fall into disuse altogether, thus bearing witness
to evolving cultural, scientific, and social dynamics.
Within philological and codicological studies, manifestations of the
hidden include erasures and censorship, variants and errors, lost
texts, successive redactional stages, and the concealment of texts
through anomalous placements within manuscripts. These phenomena raise
questions concerning the transmission, reception, and censorship of
works, testifying to processes of concealment and revelation
throughout textual history. From a literary perspective, the hidden
emerges through various textual and authorial strategies. In this
regard, the use of a pseudonym involves not merely the concealment of
a biographical identity, but also the construction of an alternative
textual identity that enables mobility across genders, classes, and
nationalities.
At an epistemological level, Derridean deconstruction has shown that
every presence entails a constitutive absence, and that every
assertion carries within it what is suppressed or deferred. Along
these lines, postcolonial and post-migrant studies have highlighted
submerged narratives, marginalised or non-canonical voices, and
minority perspectives intertwined with dialogic memory archives.
Moreover, the hidden emerges within the realm of the fantastic, which
stages the boundary between the visible and the invisible, presence
and absence, light and shadow; similarly, the fairytale compels
engagement with the subconscious and manifestations of the arcane. It
is also evident in the field of the literature of the uncanny, where
it contributes to the exploration of the unconscious, trauma, and
secrecy that shape both literary production and reception.
With regard to cinema, the hidden is a constitutive element of the
filmic image: from documentary to fiction, films build meaning through
cuts, ellipses, and shaded areas, at both the shooting and editing
stages. From this viewpoint, and particularly through the perspective
of surrealism, cinema may be considered an engine operating at the
threshold between presence and absence, consciousness and
unconsciousness, dream and reality, memory and interpretation, as well
as light and shadow. Considering the history of cinema from Neorealism
onward, the medium has continued to operate through these same themes
in order to foreground a specific inquiry into the nature of the
image; in post-modern cinema, the hidden is one of the key themes
characterising ambiguous narratives, the untold, and the multiplicity
of perspectives and meanings.
Building on these premises, the 14th edition of the Doctoral
Conference of the Department of Literary, Linguistic and Comparative
Studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” aims to explore the
multiple configurations of the hidden through a multi-, inter-, and
transdisciplinary approach, drawing on linguistic, philological,
literary, and cultural studies.

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