37.2316, Calls: Social Meaning and Acquisition (Switzerland)

Mon Jul 13 09:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2316. Mon Jul 13 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2316, Calls: Social Meaning and Acquisition (Switzerland)

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Date: 09-Jul-2026
From: Laura Reimer [laura.reimer at ds.uzh.ch]
Subject: Social Meaning and Acquisition

Full Title: Social Meaning and Acquisition

Date: 16-Feb-2027 - 17-Feb-2027
Location: Zürich, Switzerland

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Acquisition;
Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2026

Call for Papers:
Confirmed Speakers:
Anna Papafragou (University of Pennsylvania)
Devyani Sharma (University of Oxford)
Sandrine Zufferey (University of Bern)
After the successful workshop Social Meaning and Grammar, which took
place in Zürich in March 2026
(https://www.ds.uzh.ch/de/tagungen/social-meaning-and-grammar.html),
we  are now moving on to the second round. The term ‘social’ plays a
central role in the acquisition and learning literature in general
(e.g., in broad topics such as social cognition, shared
intentionality, and theory of mind). Our workshop aims to focus on
social aspects of acquisition from a more specific perspective: How
are phenomena of social meaning acquired and learned by both children
and adult learners across the lifespan?
At a conceptual level, the question is to what extent the acquisition
of social meaning falls into the domain of semantics or pragmatics. In
particular, the domain of modality seems to be relevant in the context
of semantics. Deontic modality, for instance, is concerned with
whether something is necessary or possible on the basis of social or
moral rules and regulations. Deontic meaning is acquired by children
based on a better understanding of the social consensus regulating
issues of authority, duty, commitment, and power (Papafragou 2021). In
the context of pragmatics, the question is to what extent differences
in social status (e.g., power, gender) are reflected in childrens’ use
of different speech acts (e.g., direct vs. indirect) and politeness or
discourse markers, and how these social meanings are acquired
(Zufferey 2015).
As for specific empirical domains, recent research has focused on the
acquisition of morphosyntactic means in requesting strategies (Reimer
& Trotzke 2026), but also on ways of expressing politeness via
multimodal means (e.g., body movements and gestures; Hübscher et al.
2022)—and how these strategies are acquired in children (Pronina et
al. 2021).
Although young children already show linguistic reflexes in response
to different social situations (including variations in social
distance and imposition), acquisitional data indicate that an
adult-like competence is attained rather late (see Reimer & Trotzke
2026). Furthermore, as adult speakers use a range of speaking styles,
particularly in situations of social contact, bilingualism, and
migration, changes can be observed across the lifespan (see Sharma
2024, 2025).
We seek contributions from a wide range of linguistic subfields,
including but not limited to:
 - L1 and L2 acquisition of social meaning and relevant linguistic
forms
 - Acquisition of social meaning across the life span
 - Acquisition of modality as connected to social meaning
 - Acquisition of speech act meaning or pragmatic inferences as
connected to social meaning
 - Multimodal aspects of social meaning and how they are acquired
 - Acquisition of politeness markers (e.g., morphology, particles,
pronouns) in a cross-linguistic perspective
Submission Guidelines:
We invite submissions of anonymous abstracts for 30-minute talks (20
presentation + 10 discussion). Submissions should not exceed two A4
pages (incl. references + examples), 12pt. single spaced, with 2.5cm
(= one-inch) margins on all sides. Either PDF or Word format is
accepted. Please upload your abstracts at:
https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/SocMean2/
by the deadline listed below.
Submission deadline: September 1, 2026
Notification: September 20, 2026
Workshop: February 16-17, 2027
Organizers:
Angelika Golegos & Laura Reimer
References:
Hübscher, Iris, Sánchez-Conde, Cristina, Borràs-Comes, Joan, Vincze,
Laura, & Prieto, Pilar (2022). Multimodal mitigation: how facial and
body cues index politeness in Catalan requests. Journal of Politeness
Research. 19(1), 1-29.
Papafragou, Anna (2021). Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics
Interface. Leiden, Niederlande: Brill.
Pronina, Mariia, Hübscher, Iris, Holler, Judith, & Prieto, Pilar
(2021). Interactional training interventions boost children’s
expressive pragmatic abilities: evidence from a novel multidimensional
testing approach. Cognitive Development. 57(101003).
Reimer, Laura, & Trotzke, Andreas (2026). The acquisition path of
expressing social meaning in the morphosyntax of requests. Language
Acquisition, 1-20.
Sharma, Devyani (2024). Language acquisition across the lifespan and
the emergence of new varieties. Lifespan Acquisition and Language
Change: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives, 14, 127.
Sharma, Devyani (2025). Commentary: Complex contact scenarios in the
context of individual lifespan-change. In Connecting the Individual
and the Community in Sociolinguistic Panel Research (pp. 274-281).
Routledge.
Zufferey, Sandrine (2015). Acquiring pragmatics : social and cognitive
perspectives. London/New York: Routledge.

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