37.559, Calls: Construal in Language and Discourse (Poland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-559. Wed Feb 11 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.559, Calls: Construal in Language and Discourse (Poland)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 09-Feb-2026
From: Marek Molenda [cild at uni.lodz.pl]
Subject: Construal in Language and Discourse


Full Title: Construal in Language and Discourse
Short Title: CiLD
Theme: Construal as a central concept for understanding meaning
construction across language, different forms of discourse, cognition,
narrative, and multimodal communication

Date: 21-Sep-2026 - 23-Sep-2026
Location: Łódź (Lodz), Poland
Web Site: https://www.uni.lodz.pl/cild

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Forensic
Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Philosophy of Language

Call Deadline: 31-May-2026

Call for Papers:
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.
Organisers
CiLD 2026 Organizing Committee:
Department of Linguistics and Communication, University of Łódź
Janusz Badio (Conference organiser, Chair of CiLD-2026) email:
cild at uni.lodz.pl
Kamila Ciepiela (Deputy chair, CiLD Chair),
Marek Molenda (Conference Secretary and IT)
Anna Pietruszewska (Conference Secretary): cild at uni.lodz.pl
Jakub Żak (IT Engineer)
We invite proposals for papers on: (the list is not meant to be
exhaustive)
Cognitive Linguistics:
 - Grammatical construal
 - Lexical construal
 - Domain activation and knowledge structures
 - Conceptualisation and simulation semantics
 - Figure–ground organisation
 - Perspective, profiling, and scope
 - Metaphorical and metonymic construal
 - Salience and prominence building
Discourse, Pragmatics & Narrative:
 - Participant roles and stance
 - Involvement vs. autonomy construal
 - Framing, reframing, and frame negotiation
 - Acceptance and rejection of frames
 - Indirectness
 - Interpersonal communication
 - Metamessages and implicit meaning
 - Strategic ambiguity and indirectness
 - Dynamic structure building in discourse
 - Narrative sequencing and coherence
 - Storytelling as interactional practice
 - Narrative evaluation
Sociology & Social Interaction:
 - Construal of social roles
 - Power, authority
 - Moral and normative construal
 - Ideological framing and social meaning
 - Construal in public, political, and media discourse
Narrative, Storytelling & Literature:
 - Storytelling as discourse practice
 - Narrative sequencing and coherence
 - Temporal construal and causality
 - Perspective, focalisation, and point of view
 - Character construal and evaluation
 - Narrative framing in legal, institutional, and everyday discourse
 - Literary narrative and reader construal
 - Genre-specific narrative construal
Publication:
Selected papers from the conference may be invited for submission to a
peer-reviewed special issue of Research in Language, subject to the
journal’s standard review procedures.
Submission Guidelines:
We invite proposals for individual papers (20-minute presentation +
10-minute discussion)
Abstracts should be:
 - No more than 200 words
 - Submitted in English
 - Accompanied by a short biographical note (max. 100 words) and 3–5
keywords
Please submit your Abstract here:
https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=7xpEYw7al0O7fvnUcF6WO_faSSLv7uVLil5kFd1isQNUNTVZNENRQTEyT1NLV1NVNUg3QVM4VTlFQyQlQCNjPTEu&route=shorturl
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 May 2026
Notification of acceptance: 14 June 2026
Registration and fee payment deadline: 24 August 2026: link tba
Keynote Speakers:
Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdańsk, Poland
Alan Cienki, Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Henryk Kardela, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland
Krzysztof Kredens, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, University of Łódź, Poland
Registration:
Registration Form
Payments:
The fee, which covers organisation costs, conference materials,
lunches, and refreshments, is 900 PLN for participants working at
Polish institutions (750 PLN for students) and 250 Euro for
participants from other countries (200 Euro for students). The
deadline for registration and bank payments is August 24th, 2026. The
fee should be transferred to the CiLD 2026 bank account (see below;
bank transfer charges are the responsibility of the payer).
Please make payments to the university bank account: (NOTE: please
remember to specify your name and the name of the conference – CILD
2026. For payment details, see the conference website.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-559
----------------------------------------------------------