37.2416, Confs: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Ostensibility (Finland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2416. Tue Jul 21 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2416, Confs: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Ostensibility (Finland)

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Date: 19-Jul-2026
From: Daniel Z. Kadar [dkadar at fastmail.com]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Ostensibility


Panel at IPC20: The Pragmatics of Ostensibility
Short Title: IPrA2027
Theme: The Pragmatics of Ostensibiltiy

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

We are cordinally inviting submissions for the panel outlined below.
We would like to ask colleagues with interest to contact us
(dkadar at fastmail.com and jhouse at fastmail.fm) no later than 10
September.
The aim of the panel is to bring together experts working in the field
of ostensible language use. The panel will provide a much needed
platform for discussing collaborative research between leading
experts. Starting with the classic work of Searle, the concept of
ostensibility has been important in pragmatics, and it has been
explored from different angles, including speech act theory (e.g.
Isaacs and Clark 1995; Link and Kreuz 2005), politeness theory (e.g.
Dynel 2018), rituals (e.g. Koutlaki 2020; Kadar 2024) and contrastive
pragmatics (e.g. Abdelhady 2025). Yet, to the best of our knowledge,
no attempt has been made to explore how to synthetise such different
areas of inquiry into ostensible behaviour. This lack is regretful for
different reasons. Firstly, ostensible behaviour has proved to be a
key for studying the pragmatics of a variety of different languages,
such as Persian, Arabic and Chinese. Little thought has also been
given to the question of how politeness, humour and other pragmatic
phenomena in these languages can be studied in comparable ways.
Secondly, with the growing importance of more interactional views of
speech acts (for an overview see House and Kadar 2023), it would be
timely and to consider how more traditional approaches using the
concept of ‘ostensible speech act’ can be merged with newer
approaches. Thirdly, the study of ostensible behaviour continues to be
dominated by the infamous ‘East-West dichotomy’, i.e. it is often
assumed that in so-called ‘Eastern’ languages ostensible behaviour is
more important than in Western languages. The panel aims to fill these
knowledge gaps.
The following leading experts in the field of ostensible language
research have already accepted our invitation to join the present
panel:
 - Saleem Abdelhadi (American University of the Middle East)
 - Inas Almusallam (King Saud University)
 - Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (Indiana University)
 - Ping Liu (Guangdong University of Foreign Languages)
 - Chisa Matsukawa (University of Central Lancashire)
 - Yunwen Su (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Along with these experts, we hope to involve both early-career
researchers and scholars who work on understudied languages in
particular. We will advertise the panel also on LinguistList, in order
to attract further contributors. We also hope to capitalise on the
momentum created by this panel and edit a journal special issue after
the conference.



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