Call for Papers
Discourse(s) in Linguistics: units and levels of analysis
The doctoral students in Linguistics of the laboratories at Toulouse University, France:
- CLLE-ERSS (Équipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique)
- IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse)
- Octogone-Lordat (Centre Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Langage et de la Cognition)
are organizing the 5th edition of JéTou (Journées d'études Toulousaines), an international conference aiming at gathering Master and doctoral students and young researchers (who have defended their dissertation within the past three years) together, from the different disciplines of Linguistics, on an open and multidisciplinary theme.
This 2015 edition will be devoted to a reflection on the following theme: "Discourse(s) in Linguistics: Units and Levels of Analysis".
The term discourse, understood in its broadest sense as a multimodal language production (oral, written, verbal, gestural) is at the heart of Linguistics. Both in production and reception, investigation methods have led to analysis levels with variable granularities, where overlapping units maintain relationships with strong interdependence. Therefore, discourse depends on both the object and the meaning given to it.
Common issues are: planning, segmentation, organization, modeling. A valuable reflection involving different fields arises from these challenges; more than ever, an interdisciplinary practice is necessary to further the various aspects of discourse.
Research in these fields has taken different forms. Besides, the gap between theoretical models and empirical studies based on real data has been significantly reduced in the last few years. Qualitative as well as quantitative, these works have raised new questions: choice of units, collection and annotation of corpora, evaluation procedures, comparison and interpretation of results, etc.
This edition will focus mainly on levels of analysis and units in discourse. Possible topics include:
- Phonetics and Phonology: availability and authenticity of oral corpora, phonetic and phonological features of discourse (monolingual or bilingual) in perception and production.
- Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics: macrosyntax, dynamic semantics, argumentation, speech acts, organizational frameworks, cohesion, coherence.
- Terminology and Text Linguistics: genres of discourse, variations, corpus construction, termino-ontological networks.
- Sociolinguistics: genre diversity, code-switching, code-mixing, dialectal variations.
- Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics: pathological speech, bilingual speech, planning, organizing, processing, development and cognitive aging.
- Acquisition and Learning of Languages: mutual contributions between the study of discourse and learning L1 and L2, interference.
- Natural Language Processing: synthesis and speech recognition, information extraction, importance of discourse in local use (morpho-syntactic tagging, named entity recognition).
Obviously, this list does not include all the research possibilities following from the theme of the conference, which is why every submission that addresses the notions of discourse in the Language Sciences will be read and reviewed. Proposals which include theoretical reflections and actual data will be particularly appreciated.
JéTou 2015 offers a challenging theme that every field of Language Sciences can adapt for themselves. This conference will give the opportunity, to those who wish to come, to ask questions, discuss and compare their work, their methods, their reflections in an interdisciplinary context, which favours positive interactions and constructive debates.
