37.1053, Confs: Panel at DGKL/GCLA11 - Language as Human Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1053. Mon Mar 16 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1053, Confs: Panel at DGKL/GCLA11 - Language as Human Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García (Germany)

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Date: 13-Mar-2026
From: Ilia Afanasev [ilia.afanasev.1997 at gmail.com]
Subject: Panel at DGKL/GCLA11 - Language as Human Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García


Panel at DGKL/GCLA11 - Language as Human Behaviour: The Legacy of
William Diver and Érica García

Date: 31-Aug-2026 - 02-Sep-2026
Location: Bielefeld, Germany
Contact: Ilia Afanasev
Contact Email: ilia.afanasev.1997 at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Phonetics;
Phonology; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 01-May-2026

This panel is a continuation of the first panel “Language as Human
Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García”, which took
place in 2025 as part of the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics
Conference (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and brought together scholars
from all over the world.
The panel is dedicated to the functionally-oriented linguistic
framework initiated by William Diver, Érica García and their students
at Columbia University in the 1960s has come to be known as Columbia
School (CS) linguistics. It is based on two fundamental
understandings:
- that language is an instance of human behavior, so it can be
“expected to share characteristics that are found in other aspects of
human activity and cognition” (Stern 2019, p. 3);
- that language is an instrument inherently designed for
communication, so “it must be the case that its fundamental structural
components be signals and meanings; that is, that language share in
the characteristic that is common to all instruments of communication”
(Diver 2012, p. 47).
Originally born as a reaction to the empirical failure of formalist
approaches, the aim of CS is to discover how language is structured
based on facts of actual usage. It adopts an inductive approach with
the objective of accounting for the way language is effectively
exploited by human beings.
CS research has the following distinctive features:
- an “aposterioristic” (Huffman 2006, p. 44) approach to linguistic
analysis: no categories are assumed, but rather hypotheses are
proposed and tested based on empirical data;
- an understanding that linguistic structure is not autonomous, but
invariably motivated by the communicative needs and the physical,
cognitive, and cultural traits of human beings;
- an instrumental view of meaning: it is recognized that language is
not compositional; rather, linguistic inputs serve as mere hints from
which messages can be contextually inferred;
- a fundamental interest in explanation: the ultimate goal is to
understand the non-random patterns of sound/writing/signing produced
for human communication;
- a reliance on naturally occurring discourse as a basis for
linguistic analysis;
- a qualitative-quantitative methodology: close textual analysis is
combined with testing of predictions regarding the “relative frequency
of use” (Martínez 2009, p. 268) of the item(s) under study in specific
contexts. The purpose of this session is to offer a forum for the
dissemination of some of the latest findings in CS research, and
foster discussion and debate within and outside the framework.
The possible topics of the submissions may include:
 - Cognitive grammar
 - Lexical semantics
 - Phonology
 - Pragmatics
 - Language variation and change
 - Language contact and multilingualism
 - Applied linguistics
 - Endangered languages
Deadline for abstract submission:
01.05.2026 (UTC-12, AoE)
Please send your abstracts (no more than 1 A4 page, Times New Roman
12, single-spaced, excluding examples and references) to
ilia.afanasev.1997 at gmail.com (Ilia Afanasev) and dpvansoeren at gmail.com
(Daan van Soeren)



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