LINGUIST List 21.3100 Wed Jul 28 2010 Calls: Pragmatics, Socioling/United Kingdom Editor for this issue: Di Wdzenczny <dilinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.    Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou, Constructing Collectivity: 'We' in interaction Message 1: Constructing Collectivity: 'We' in interaction Date: 28-Jul-2010 From: Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou <pavlidoulit.auth.gr> Subject: Constructing Collectivity: 'We' in interaction E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Constructing Collectivity: 'We' in interaction Date: 03-Jul-2011 - 08-Jul-2011 Location: Manchester, United Kingdom Contact Person: Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou Meeting Email: pavlidoulit.auth.gr Web Site: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1403 Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics Call Deadline: 10-Sep-2010 Meeting Description: The first person plural, represented here for convenience through the pronoun 'we' -the prototypical marker of group indexicality (cf. Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990)-, offers itself to various strands of linguistic/pragmatic inquiry, including the study of subjectivity, speaker deixis, personal pronouns, person reference/formulation, etc. However, the topic has been given equally little attention in all these areas, especially with respect to languages other than English. Only recently, research on 'we' seems to have gained some impetus (cf. e.g. Assouline 2010, Bazzanella 2009, Borthen 2010, Duszak 2002, Lerner & Kitzinger 2007, Pavlidou 2008, Stewart 2001, Temmerman 2008); no coherent picture, though, is yet emergent. The aim of the panel is to bring together scholars who will explore the workings of 'we' in interaction, in particular, how speakers present themselves as members/part of a group or collectivity by exploiting the means that different languages have to offer. At the intersection of pragmatics with grammar, the panel will focus on the following issues: (a) What can speakers do referentially with the first person plural 'we' (cf. e.g. the so-called impersonal, royal, directive uses of 'we') in different languages? (b) What is the role of the free-standing subject pronoun 'we' in null-subject languages? Does this pronoun preserve the referential uses of 'we'? Is there something specific to 'we' as compared to other free-standing subject pronouns? (c) What is the contribution of the plural number to the construction of the 'we'-collectivity as opposed to 'they' or 'you-PLURAL'? How does 'we' as a minimal recognitional form relate to other phrases that allow collective reference (e.g. 'we, Europeans,' or 'Mary, Ann and I')? (d) How do speakers manage self-representation as individual vs. collective subjects (of varying degrees of abstraction, e.g. subset of participants vs. general social categories)? How is inclusion/exclusion of others achieved? What does self- or other-repair (from e.g. 'we' to 'I') tell us about e.g. claiming collective agency, dispersing personal responsibility, maintaining allegiances? What is ultimately of interest is the dynamic process of delineating and (re- )constructing collective subjects that arises, among other things, from the inherent fluidity and vagueness of 'we' (as opposed to 'I', within the same stretch of discourse), and how this process gets accomplished across different interactional contexts and languages. Call For Papers Presentations addressing (some of) the above or similar issues, especially with respect to non-Indo-European languages, are invited. Given the panel's orientation to interaction, contributions based on naturalistic data, adopting a Conversation Analysis perspective, are most welcome, although other theoretical approaches are not excluded either. Abstracts (not exceeding 500 words) should be sent as an email attachment to Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (pavlidoulit.auth.gr) before September 10, 2010. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent out by the beginning of October 2010. Please note that: - abstracts should not be programmatic and, if accepted by the organizer of the panel, they will also have to be submitted individually via the IPrA conference site before October 29, 2010 (http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx? c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1403 ), - IPrA membership is presupposed both for submitting an abstract to the organizers of the IPrA conference and for participating in the conference, - multiple contributions by the same person as first or single author are not accepted. 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