Full Title: AFLiCo 10: Interaction and Discourse
Short Title: AFLiCo10
Theme: Interaction and Discourse

Date: 22-Jun-2026 - 24-Jun-2026
Location: Paris Campus Condorcet (Aubervilliers), France
Web Site: https://aflico10.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 31-Oct-2025

Call for Papers:

The French Cognitive Linguistics Association (AFLiCo) is pleased to announce its 10th international conference (AFLiCo10), to be held in Paris from June 22nd to June 24th 2026. The theme of the conference will be Interaction and Discourse.

Going back to Clark’s (1996) joint action hypothesis, language is seen as a joint activity, which draws on a common ground shared among speakers, who have to constantly coordinate with each other in order to make their intentions known to the discourse participants. Central to the concept of common ground is the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Tomasello, 1999) and the conventions that are intersubjectively shared by speakers both for the production and the interpretation of an utterance. These conventions can also be recognized through multimodal cues, as people make use of different non-verbal elements when they communicate (Norris, 2004).

Multimodality has been at the center of several studies, allowing a more fine-grained analysis of discourse use from different sources, such as animations, films, commercials (see, for example, Forceville, 2024; Forceville, 2025), television series and shows, memes, etc. Such studies have focused on the role that non-verbal markers play in the production and interpretation of discourse (for example, Cienki, 2008; McNeill, 2008; Lapaire, 2013, and many others). This has opened new pathways for research on gaze (Brône et al., 2017; Brône & Oben, 2018), eye-tracking studies (Zima et al., in print), prosodic cues, facial expressions, among others. Corpus studies thus allow more data and theories to be tested (Gilquin, 2024).

Public and mediated discourse has been extensively studied in cognitive linguistics, particularly with regard to political speeches, media interviews, and journalistic narratives (Chilton, 2004; Hart, 2013; Musolff, 2016; Koller 2025). Such forms of discourse offer fertile ground for analyzing how stance-taking, metaphor, and conceptual framing shape collective understanding and interaction in the public sphere. In a rapidly evolving media landscape, continued research is essential to account for new discursive practices, notably in relation to emerging platforms and shifting patterns of audience engagement.

For a complete list of references, please visit the conference website.

We encourage contributions that explore the multifaceted interplay between discourse and interaction from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We invite papers on, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Multimodality
- Interaction
- Gesture studies
- Discourse analysis (political discourse, metaphor and/or metonymy)
- Emotion, facial expressions
- Humor (irony and/or sarcasm, wordplay, spontaneous and non-spontaneous, etc.)
- Stance-taking /intersubjectivity
- Common ground
- Didactics and L1/L2 acquisition
- Eye-tracking studies
- Corpus studies
Abstracts of no more than 500 words (excluding references), in English or French, should be submitted via https://aflico10.sciencesconf.org/.

Key Dates:
Submission: July 1 to October 31, 2025
Notification of acceptance: January 2026
Registration: Spring 2026
Conference: June 22 to 24, 2026

Event Sponsors:
Paris 8, Paris Cité, Paris Nanterre