37.521, Confs: Construal in Language and Discourse (Poland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-521. Mon Feb 09 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.521, Confs: Construal in Language and Discourse (Poland)

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Date: 04-Feb-2026
From: Janusz Badio, Chair [cild at uni.lodz.pl]
Subject: Construal in Language and Discourse


Construal in Language and Discourse
Short Title: CiLD

Date: 21-Sep-2026 - 23-Sep-2026
Location: Lodz, Poland
Contact: Janusz Badio
Contact Email: cild at uni.lodz.pl
Meeting URL: https://www.uni.lodz.pl/cild

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Cognitive Science; Discourse
Analysis; Forensic Linguistics; General Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Language Family(ies): Alur; English based

Submission Deadline: 31-May-2026

The conference Construal in Language and Discourse invites
contributions that examine construal as a central concept for
understanding meaning construction across language, different forms of
discourse, cognition, narrative, and multimodal communication.
In Cognitive Linguistics, construal refers to how speakers and writers
conceptualise experience by selecting, structuring, profiling,
foregrounding, backgrounding, and simulating aspects of a scene. This
conference adopts and extends this view, proposing construal as a
general cognitive operation of conceptualisation, applicable across
linguistic levels, discourse structures, narrative forms,
interactional settings, and communicative modalities.
The conference adopts a flexible view of the relationship between
construal and linguistic expression/coding. Construal refers broadly
to how events, participants, relations, inferences, evaluations, and
temporal structures are conceptualised, framed, and made salient,
while verbal and non-verbal resources—lexical, grammatical, prosodic,
gestural, visual, and multimodal—are among the means through which
such construals are communicated and negotiated in discourse.
Within Cognitive Linguistics, construal encompasses grammatical and
lexical choices, constructional meaning, domain activation and
knowledge structures, conceptualisation and simulation semantics,
representational format, figure–ground organisation, metaphorical and
metonymic processes, salience and prominence building, and narrative
construal across extended discourse. Cognitive Linguistics is
explicitly understood as extending beyond the sentence, encompassing
discourse, genre, and narrative organisation.
>From a discourse-pragmatic and narrative perspective, construal
concerns how stories are built, maintained, contested, and
reinterpreted in interaction. Topics include participant roles,
directness vs indirectness, stance-taking, involvement vs. autonomy,
framing and reframing, activation of metamessage and its strategic
use, acceptance and rejection of frames, argumentation, strategic
ambiguity, and narrative sequencing and evaluation. These issues are
especially salient in institutional, forensic, and literary contexts,
where competing construals of events, characters, intentions, and
moral evaluations are at stake.
The conference explicitly welcomes contributions on forensic
linguistics, where narrative construal is central to witness
testimonies, police interviews, courtroom discourse, and legal
storytelling, as well as work on literary discourse, where construal
is shapes and is shaped by point of view, temporal structure,
characterisation, and reader interpretation.
In addition, the conference invites work on gesture and multimodal
communication, where narrative meaning is constructed across embodied,
visual, and audiovisual modalities, and contributions at the interface
with Cognitive Psychology, including memory, attention, consciousness,
cognitive control, reasoning, and mental simulation.
By bringing together cognitive, narrative, interactional, pragmatic,
forensic, literary, and multimodal approaches, the conference aims to
establish construal as a unifying concept for understanding meaning in
language and discourse.



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