Full Title: The Language of Sugar

Date: 06-Dec-2025 - 06-Dec-2025
Location: Klagenfurt, Austria
Contact Person: Georg Marko
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Oct-2025

Final Call for Papers:

Deadline extended to 1 October 2025

No wonder sugar is on everyone’s lips (pun intended): it is just an omnipresent item and a hotly debated topic. But there are many facets to it: sugar is an agricultural product, a food item, a nutrient, and a biochemical component of our bodies. The meanings of sugar are thus constructed in many different discourses, with different aspects being foregrounded. Many of these aspects are problematic and controversial, whether the role of slavery and the exploitation of people and the environment in its production and trade, its dominance in matters of taste, or its detrimental effects on health, especially in connection with type-2 diabetes, obesity and dental hygiene. ‘Sugar’, however, is also word and therefore has semantic relations with other words in the lexicon, it is part of complex expressions such as compounds and idioms, and – together with related words such as ‘candy’, ‘honey’, or ‘sweet’ – it is also often used metaphorically and metonymically.

The goal of our workshop is to bring together studies that explore these different dimensions of the meaning of sugar, both from a discourse-oriented perspective, looking at how sugar is represented in texts, and a language system-oriented perspective, examining the word field and figurative usages.

We invite contributions which report on current research on these different aspects of sugar. We put great emphasis on interdisciplinarity – researchers from different academic (and non-academic) backgrounds, working with different approaches, preferably in joint projects – and diversity – different topics, sociocultural and political contexts, registers and genres, and languages. The workshop language is English, but this by no means limits the object languages examined.

This workshop, supported by verbal, the Association of Applied Linguistics in Austria, will take place at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, on Saturday, 6 December 2025, and will be co-organized by Eva Triebl (University of Vienna, Austria), Georg Marko and Hermine Penz (both University of Graz, Austria).

Please submit an abstract of 150-300 words (including references) to georg.marko(at)uni-graz.at by 1 October 2025 (notification will be sent by 6 October 2025). All abstracts have to include references and follow the guidelines of the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics (https://clas.wayne.edu/linguistics/resources/style). Individual presentations will be allocated 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for discussion. The workshop language is English.