37.2910, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Collateral Sounds (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2910. Mon Sep 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2910, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Collateral Sounds (Finland)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, 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: 11-Sep-2026
From: Vladislav Maraev [vladislav.maraev at gu.se]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: Collateral Sounds


Panel at IPC20: Collateral Sounds

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Vladislav Maraev
Contact Email: vladislav.maraev at gu.se

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics;
Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Collateral sounds (laughs, lip-smacks, sighs, grunts, clicks, etc.), a
subset of what H. Clark calls collateral signals, are frequent in
human-human communication and play a role which is parallel to
information exchange between speakers. Collateral sounds can be used
for meta-communication, negotiating the meaning and understanding,
construction of epistemic stances towards one another and modifying
the propositional content of utterances. Despite the variety of
potential functions, such collateral sounds are highly underspecified
and meanings conveyed by them are defeasible (e.g., laughing at
vs. laughing with). In sociolinguistics, such sounds can be analysed
as socially conditioned variations (e.g., -ing vs. -in') and act as
resources for constructing personal linguistic styles, and attribution
of personae. Even though current AI systems seem to display
conversational behaviours, such sounds are rarely, if ever, detected
or produced by these systems. Such signals are typically missing from
training data, thus limiting interactions with conversational AI --
even when using the voice modality -- to impoverished informational
exchanges which lack many of the inferential meanings that people can
draw from any conversational interaction. People typically pick out
such signals as quintessentially human and as conveying social
meaning, emotions and even an agent's consciousness, therefore it is
crucial to understand the consequences of including them in AI
systems.
This panel welcomes submissions from a wide range of subject areas:
linguistics, conversation analysis, computational linguistics,
sociolinguistics, human-computer interaction and cognitive science.
The topics of the panel include (but are not limited to) the following
sounds:
- Laughter and speech-laughter
- Voice quality, accents, socially conditioned variations
- Clicks and lip-smacks
- Sighs, coughs, in-breaths and grunts
- Blowing a raspberry and other 'inappropriate sounds'
- Prosodic markings
- Filled pauses
The contributions are submitted in a format of an abstract (min. 250
and max. 500 words) via the International Pragmatics Conference
website by 15 October 2026.
https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027
Following the panel, we are planning to submit a proposal for a
special issue and invite the participating authors to contribute.
Note that IPrA membership is required for submitting an abstract (with
all deadlines in 2026) as well as for presenting during the conference
(in 2027), and that membership always runs from 1 January to 31
December, no matter at what time in the year it is applied for.
Organisers: Vladislav Maraev, Christine Howes and Ellen Breitholtz
(University of Gothenburg)



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

********************** 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:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

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

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

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

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

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

MDPI Languages https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

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-37-2910
----------------------------------------------------------