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LINGUIST List 17.2808

Thu Sep 28 2006

Calls: Cognitive Science, Semantics/Poland

Editor for this issue: Dan Parker <danlinguistlist.org>

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in the text. To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.
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        1.    Adam Glaz, Vantage Theory and Point of View
Message 1: Vantage Theory and Point of View
Date: 28-Sep-2006
From: Adam Glaz <adam.glazumcs.lublin.pl>
Subject: Vantage Theory and Point of View



Full Title: Vantage Theory and Point of View

Date: 15-Jul-2007 - 20-Jul-2007
Location: Krakow, Poland
Contact Person: Sukriye Ruhi
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 03-Nov-2006

Meeting Description:

Theme Session at the 10th ICLC in Krakow, Poland (July 2007). Please send
abstracts (500 words max.) to Adam Glaz at adam.glazumcs.lublin.pl before
Nov 3, 2006.

The session is planned as a continuation and extension of an earlier event
at the 6th ICLC in Stockholm, 1999. That earlier session was devoted to
linguistic applications of vantage theory (VT), a cognition-based model of
(colour) categorization. It was convened and chaired by VT's founder, the
late Robert E. MacLaury, and the papers delivered appeared in print in a
special issue of Language Sciences (vol. 24, nos. 5-6, 2002). VT was shown
to constitute a valuable contribution to language studies. The present
session will be devoted to reviewing the VT-linguistics interface and,
hopefully, extending the application of VT onto previously unexplored areas.
VT holds that people categorize by drawing an instinctive and subconscious
analogy to the way they orient themselves in spacetime. A category is a sum
of the vantages taken on it, i.e. arrangements of fixed and mobile
cognitive coordinates, a vantage being a point of view. Fixed coordinates
vary depending on the domain, mobile coordinates are reciprocally balanced
degrees of attention to similarity and difference. Vantages and categories
arise as quickly as one can think and talk, the process playing a primary
role in language use. (More on VT at http://klio.umcs.lublin.pl/~adglaz/vt.html).

The participants are invited to (i) offer proposals for solving problems
at the VT-linguistics interface or (ii) address the more general issues
raised by Robert MacLaury in relation to language.

As for (i), the list of questions includes but is by no means limited to
the following:

-What problems arise while applying VT to language? What
modifications/adaptations of the theory are called for?
-Which areas of linguistics are especially open to analyses couched within
the VT tradition? Which ones pose more problems?
-How to best understand a vantage? What analogues does it have in
language? Can one provide clear and unambiguous linguistic examples of the
dominant and recessive vantages? Can one preserve the terminology? What
relationship between vantages can be thought of (hierarhies, embedding,
other)? How does the notion of vantage relate to that of point of view?
-What other VT constructs figure as important in linguistic analyses?

The more general level (ii) embraces at least three interrelated issues,
potential springboards for discussion:

-Subjectivity of meaning. To what extent is meaning ''given'' by language
units and to what does it emerge out of the subject's interactions with the
world?
-Speaker agency. Within the bounds of their cognitive abilities
conceptualizers enjoy a considerable amount of leeway and are unconstrained
by language in any dramatic sense. But in what sense are they, if at all?
Where are the limits of the freedom?
-Linguistic relativity. VT stresses cultural and individual differences
between speakers. Do conceptualizations yield different results because of
the nature of the language spoken or regardless of it?

It is hoped that the session will also pose new questions in ways not
anticipated by its convener.


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