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Call for Papers
34th International LAUD Symposium
Cognitive Sociolinguistics:
Language variation in its structural, conceptual and cultural dimensions
University of Koblenz-Landau ,
Landau/Pf., Germany
March 15-18, 2010
MAIN KEYNOTE SPEAKER
William Labov
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, USAPLENARY SPEAKERS
Penelope Eckert, Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Th. Gries, Peter Harder,
Gitte Kristiansen, David Kronenfeld, Dennis Preston
Aim and scope :
Within Cognitive Linguistics and other cognitively oriented approaches to language there is a growing interest for language variation in all its dimensions, as witnessed by several publications, most recently by the landmark-fixing collective volume Cognitive Sociolinguistics (2008), edited by Gitte Kristiansen and René Dirven.
In the past decades, linguistic analyses within Cognitive Linguistics or other cognitively oriented theories were all too often carried out at the level of ‘a general, uniform language’, disregarding the rich and complex patterns of intralingual and communicative variation in that language. Such a shallow level of granularity ultimately amounts to that of a homogeneous and thus idealized speech community, reminiscent of Chomsky’s ideal speaker-hearer. To the extent that Cognitive Linguistics takes its claim of being a usage-based approach to language and cognition seriously, it cannot continue to work with an implicitly assumed conception of language being situated taxonomically at an almost Chomskyan level of abstraction.
Cognitive Sociolinguistic research fills this gap in an enriched manner, by combining the CL theoretical framework with the empirical methods used in sociolinguistics and social science at large.
The LAUD symposium is planning to explore the different facets of this emerging coalescence between cognitive, usage-based approaches to language and a sociolinguistic interest in language-internal variation in three theme sessions, each addressing one of the following questions:
1. How do social and cognitive perspectives fit together in a general, overall model of language?
2. To what extent is usage-based language variation socially structured, and how is such language-internal variation represented in the individual language user's (implicit or explicit) knowledge?
3. How does language-internal variation affect the conceptual aspects of language, i.e. linguistic meaning and linguistic categorization, and how does language variation interact with cultural models in a linguistic community?
Theme Session 1:
Social factors as foundational issues in a theory of language
The first session examines the role of social factors in the conception of language as such: to what extent should the social nature of language play a role in the linguist's conception of the linguistic system - and in the individual language user's acquisition and knowledge of the language? If we abandon the simplification of an ideal speaker-hearer, what are the descriptive consequences: what models and methodologies should we use to get a grip on the interaction between social usage and individual knowledge of the language?
In the context of this theme, we invite abstracts on topics like the following:
- The social status of linguistic facts
- Variability and the linguistic system
- Linguistic norms, rules and behavior
- The ideal and the real speaker-hearer
- Situated cognition and the distribution of (linguistic) knowledge
- Social and individual usage: models, methods and research questions
- The treatment of social factors and variation in the history of (cognitive) linguistics
Theme Session 2:
Structural variation from a usage-based perspective
How are lectal variation, linguistic change, and language acquisition affected by taking a usage-based approach to language ? Usage-based and meaning-based models of grammar introduce more variation into the grammar than a rule-based approach tends to do: the language-internal or discourse-related factors that influence the use of a particular construction may be manifold, and the presence or absence of a construction is not an all-or-none matter. In the analysis of this type of variation, it often appears that the variation is co-determined by 'external', sociostylistic factors: the variation that appears in actual usage (e.g. as attested in corpora) may be determined simultaneously by grammatical, discursive, and socio-stylistic factors. Furthermore, awareness (of linguistic factors and social dimensions) also plays a role in successful conceptualisation, together with structured patterns of subjective and objective perception.
In the context of this theme, we invite abstracts on topics like the following:
- Cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics
- Cognitive linguistics and dialectology
- Cognitive linguistics and stylistics
- Cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis
- Linguistic variation and multidimensional research
- Usage-based mechanisms of language change
- Exemplar-based models of language variation
- Lectal and interactional factors in language acquisition
- Perceptual dialectology and production
- Subjective and objective linguistic distances
- Language attitude research and quantitative data
- Linguistic variation and varieties: expert analysis versus folk perception
- Folk perception of bilingualism and multilingualism
Theme Session 3:
Social and cultural variation of categorization and cognitive models
To what extent do the phenomena that we typically focus on in Cognitive Linguistics and other meaning-related approaches - phenomena involving meaning and categorization - exhibit variation within the same linguistic community? Both the concept of semantic flexibility (as in prototype theory and radial networks) and the concept of cultural models played an important role in the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics, but such variation of meaning is seldom analyzed from a socio-stylistic point of view. So, how does variability of cultural and cognitive models work within a community, and how does it interact with variability of language and language use? Does language variation follow from cultural models, or just reflect them or, on the contrary, determine them? In particular, what are the cultural models that people use to think about language variation and language-related social variation?
In the context of this theme, we invite abstracts on topics like the following:
- Lectal variation of cognitive models and metaphorical mappings
- Lectal variation within prototype-based structures and radial networks
- Prototypes, stereotypes, and the division of linguistic labour
- Intralinguistic semantic conflicts and their resolution
- The relation between language variation and cognition within a single language
- Dialectal and sociolectal variation of meaning
- Styles and registers as categories of meaning
- The linguistic construal of identities as meaning creation
- Social cognition, social categorization and i nteractional sociolinguistics
- Cultural models and their interaction with Idealized Cognitive Models
- Universalism and (historical, cultural, anthropological) variability of cognitive models
- Competition and conflict between cultural models
- Cultural models and ideology
- Critical-linguistic approaches such as Critical Cognitive Linguistics, and cognitively inspired Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
- Cultural models of social variation
- Cultural models of language variation, and their consequences for language planning and language policy
- Language-based social stereotyping
CONFERENCE FEES
The conference fee is EUR 75 payable on arrival.
SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
Submissions are solicited for theme session presentations which should last for 20-25 minutes with 5-10 minutes for questions (maximum 30 minutes total). All submissions for presentations should follow the following abstract guidelines:
- The deadline for abstracts is September 1, 2009 .
- The address for submitting the abstracts is Martin Pütz
- Abstracts should be no more than 500 words.
- The subject header of your email should include: Abstract LAUD 2010 – name/s.
- Please include the following information in the main body of your email:
name of author/s, affiliation, email address, presentation title.- Please also state for which of the 4 theme sessions, as listed above, your contribution is intended.
Notification of acceptance will be given by September 30, 2009.
LOCAL CONFERENCE ORGANIZER
Martin Pütz
Email: Puetz@uni-landau
University of Koblenz-LandauFB 6 Institut für Fremdsprachliche Philologien
Fach Anglistik
Marktstr. 40
76829 Landau/Pf.
Germany