LINGUIST List 13.1042

Mon Apr 15 2002

Calls: Pragmatics, Argument Structure

Editor for this issue: Renee Galvis <reneelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Jef Verschueren, 8th International Pragmatics Conference
2. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Conference Calls: Argument Structure

8th INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE
TORONTO, Canada
13-18 July 2003

The 8th International Pragmatics Conference will be held on 13-18 July
2003 at the University of Toronto.

CONFERENCE CHAIR: Monica HELLER (Univ. of Toronto)

LOCAL SITE COMMITTEE: Susan EHRLICH (York Univ.), Ruth KING (York
Univ.), Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Grit LIEBSCHER (Univ. of
Waterloo), Bonnie McELHINNY (Univ. of Toronto) Donna PATRICK (Brock
Univ.)

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: In addition to the members of the
Local Site Committee, the International Conference Committee includes:
Charles ANTAKI (Loughborough Univ.), Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of
California at Santa Barbara), Susan ERVIN-TRIPP (Univ. of California
at Berkeley; IPrA President), GU Yueguo (Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences), Andreas JUCKER (Justus Liebig Univ. Giessen), Ferenc KIEFER
(Hungarian Academy of Sciences; chair, 7th IPC), Eniko NEMETH (Univ of
Szeged), Ben RAMPTON (King's College London), Eddy ROULET (Univ. of
Geneva), Anna-Brita STENSTROM (Univ. of Bergen), Elizabeth TRAUGOTT
(Stanford Univ.), Jef VERSCHUEREN (Univ. of Antwerp; IPrA Secretary
General), Yorick WILKS (Univ. of Sheffield)

THEMES: As always, the conference will be open to all themes relevant
to the pragmatics of language in its widest sense as an
interdisciplinary cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.
Prospective participants should, however, pay attention to the
distribution of topics across event types, as described below. In
addition, there is a special theme.

SPECIAL THEME:

Linguistic pluralism : policies, practices and pragmatics

This is a theme that was chosen by the Local Site Committee and
approved by the Consultation Board. It corresponds to the interests of
a large number of IPrA members, and permits us to link cognitive,
linguistic, social and political approaches to a phenomenon of
long-standing interest in pragmatics and of current theoretical, as
well as social and policy importance. The intention will be to focus
the conference on making those links in a number of ways, ranging from
choice of plenary speakers and special panels, to invitations to
interested and relevant Canadians outside the academy. The theme is
one which also fits the venue, given Canada's historical involvement
in debates on such issues, and Toronto's profile as a major centre of
new globalized urban multilingualism. However, it is meant here to go
beyond traditional ideas about "multilingualism" understood as
connecting linguistic difference primarily to ethnic or national
distinctions, and rather to extend that concept to the links between
language and all forms of social difference and social inequality. The
theme is also appropriate to the expertise of the members of the Local
Site Committee which is committed to tying academic approaches to
broader public debates.


PLENARY LECTURES: Plenary speakers will include

Susan GAL (Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Chicago), Language
ideologies and the practices of power: "Reading between the lines"
during the Cold War

Jocelyn LETOURNEAU (Departement d'histoire, Univ. Laval, Quebec), La
langue comme lieu de memoire et lieu de passage / Language as realm of
memory and passage

Lorenza MONDADA (Sciences du Langage, Univ. Lumiere, Lyon, France),
Scientific knowledge as an interactional accomplishment: On the
analysis of research groups in international networks

Eni ORLANDI (Univ. Estadual de Campinas, Brazil), Le Discours en tant
qu'objet specifique dans l'histoire des Sciences du Langage /
Discourse as a specific object in the history of Language Sciences

Dan SPERBER (CNRS, Paris, France) Relevance theory: Pragmatics and beyond

Ruth WODAK (Inst. fur Sprachwissenschaft, Univ. of Vienna, Austria),
European language policies and European identities


PANELS:

* Oeuvre panels

Jan BLOMMAERT (University of Ghent), Pierre Bourdieu: The ethnographic
turn This panel is devoted to the work of Pierre BOURDIEU and its
relevance for pragmatics.

Charles BRIGGS (University of California at San Diego), Pragmatics of
institutional discourse This panel is devoted to the work of Aaron
CICOUREL and its relevance for pragmatics.

Jenny COOK-GUMPERZ (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara), Basil
Bernstein and pragmatics: class, code and language This panel is
devoted to the work of Basil BERNSTEIN and its relevance for
pragmatics.

* Special topic panels

Peter AUER (Univ. Freiburg), Acts of identity: Language indexing
social membership

Adriana BOLIVAR & Paola BENTIVOGLIO (Univ. Central de Venezuela),
Changing attitudes to lesser languages in Latin America

James COLLINS (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Class, Identity, and
Literacy: Ethnographic and Discourse-Analytic Perspectives

Werner KALLMEYER & Inken KEIM (Inst. fur Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim),
Sociostylistic perspectives on language and identity

Normand LABRIE (Univ. of Toronto), Enjeux de sante dans des societes
plurilingues

Yaron MATRAS (Univ. of Manchester), The mixed language debate: Natural
evolution and structural manipulation

Donna PATRICK (Brock Univ.), Indigenous language stability and change

Kanavillil RAJAGOPALAN (Univ. Estadual de Campinas) & Marilyn
MARTIN-JONES (Univ. of Wales), Politics of language and the linguist

Tomek STRZALKOWSKI (State Univ. of New York - Albany), Building
automated multilingual call centers

* General interest panels

Jean-Paul BRONCKART & Laurent FILLIETTAZ (Univ. de Geneve), L'analyse
des actions et des discours en situation de travail

Robyn CARSTON (Univ. College London), Relevance theory and word meaning

Yrjo ENGESTROM (Univ. of California at San Diego), Activity theory,
pragmatics and the study of language at work

Katarzyna JASZCZOLT (Cambridge Univ.), Temporality and post-Gricean
pragmatics

Asa KASHER (Tel Aviv Univ.), Revisiting philosophical pragmatics:
Implicatures and speech act theory

Michael PERKINS (Univ. of Sheffield), Pragmatics and language pathology

Corinne ROSSARI & Eddy ROULET (Univ. de Geneve), Les nouveaux
developpements dans les recherches sur les relations de discours et
leurs marqueurs

Scott SCHWENTER (Ohio State Univ.), Current issues in the diachronic
micropragmatics of Romance languages

Anna-Brita STENSTROM & Karin AIJMER (Univ. of Bergen & Univ. of
Gothenburg), Conversation analysis: Different approaches to spoken
interaction


CALL FOR PAPERS

There is one submission deadline for paper and panel proposals:

1 November 2002 

A call for papers with complete instructions is to be found on the
IPrA website (address below). Paper versions can be requested from Ann
Verhaert (ann.verhaertipra.be)

GO TO: http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/


Jef Verschueren
IPrA Research Center
University of Antwerp
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
tel. +32-3-8202773, fax & tel. +32-3-2305574
jef.verschuerenua.ac.be

also visit the IPrA website at http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/

Argument Structure in Delhi

The department of linguistics, University of Delhi in collaboration
with the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) is organising a
conference on Argument Structure from January 5-7, 2003 at Delhi.
Howard Lasnik of the University of Conneticut is the invited
speaker. We invite abstracts not exceeding two A4 size pages
(inclusive of data and 12 pt font size) on the above theme by August
1, 2002. Scholars working in the areas of LFG, HPSG, Functional/
Computational Linguistics, Language Acquisition/ Psycholinguistics are
also welcome to submit abstracts as we intend to have a comprehensive
coverage of the issue of Argument Structure from different
theoretical/ empirical perspectives.

Various issues emerge from a closer look at the broad theme of
argument structure in grammar: the role of thematic hierarchy, the
relation between Case and configurationality, the relation between
case and agreement, ergativity, the structure of the VP/vP, etc. With
the development of the discipline, these issues have been shown to be
related to one another at various levels and the purpose of the
conference is to bring together experts from different theoretical
orientations to point out the empirical and the theoretical importance
of these relations and the degree to which they are related. For
example, the formulation, Universality of Theta Assignment Hypothesis
is somewhat challenged by a potential division between language types
on the basis of ergativity. An investigation into the nature of
ergativity leads to the question of whether ergative languages assign
thematic roles in ways different from non-ergative languages.

We consider this challenge as inseparable from the issue of how the
VP-shell is constructed in typologically differing languages. The
issue of word order and language typology in this connection forces us
to look in detail at configurationality and its significance for the
issue of argument structure and therefore at the Antisymmetry
thesis. Closely related to this is the issue of Case, in particular,
the relation between the functional structure and Case/ argument
positions in a clause. In addition, the issue of Case and agreement
becomes important in frameworks like the Minimalist Program, which
adopts the view that they are inseparable (George and Kornfilt 1981).
Is this really necessary? We want to address this question on the
basis of empirical evidence from typologically diverse languages
displaying, in general, agreement in the non-finite domain.

In connection with the structure of the vP/ VP, particular
constructions that are often discussed in detail include: causatives,
unaccusative/ unergative, double object and dative constructions,
etc. These construction types throw up issues related to the thematic
structure and syntactic properties of Case and agreement. Finally, we
see this relation as crucially bearing upon the notion of a Phase: is
it really the case that what represents a "propositional" whole
must necessarily also conform to the argument structure of the clause?
Broadly, the connection between the semantics and the different
syntactic layers of a clause is brought to light in such an
investigation about the Phase-like properties of the vP.

Abstracts may be sent as email attachments (Word, RTF, PDF only) to
the following and snail-mail abstracts (in 5 copies) may be sent to
the postal address below:

Tanmoy Bhattacharya, <tanmoydu.ac.in>, 
<bhattach2000yahoo.ac.uk> 
KV Subbarao <KVS2811yahoo.com>

Department of Linguistics
Arts Faculty Extension
University of Delhi
Delhi - 110007, INDIA