RT list: Urgent CFP: IPrA conference Panel on the syntax/pragmatics interface

Dear all,

I am sending out this message, since one of the participants in a
panel I am organising for the forthcoming IPrA conference (Manchester,
4-8 July 2011) just withdrew their participation and I am looking for
a possible replacement. I am afraid that the deadline for the
submission of abstracts is this Friday, the 29th of October, so I
would need to coordinate this as soon as possible. The title of the
panel is "Cognitive pragmatics and its interfaces in linguistics" and
I am looking for a talk on the interface between syntax and
pragmatics. Here is the panel's outline to which the potential
presentation would need to pertain.

       "Contemporary pragmatic theories have been more or less based
on the original Gricean arguments regarding the study of
speaker-intended meaning, which is derived from inference over the
discourse context in which an utterance occurs. Arguably, another
landmark in the evolution of theorising about linguistic pragmatics
can be located in Relevance Theory’s insistence that pragmatics needs
to be pursued from a cognitive perspective, within which a
psychologically realistic view of the human cognitive system is both
criterial for good pragmatic theory and an overall aim of pragmatic
analysis. In this respect, current discussions of pragmatics, while
still mainly philosophical, are increasingly affected by research in
cognitive psychology and regularly meet with the requirement that they
put forth experimentally testable theoretical predictions. Because of
this, cognitive pragmatic accounts are comparable to
cognitive/mentalist approaches to other linguistic sub-fields and
should therefore logically fit together with them. Even so, there is a
lot of scepticism on whether pragmatics can be usefully implemented in
our theoretical descriptions of what knowledge of language ultimately
consists in. This is probably due to the fact that inferences
regarding speaker-intentions lie outside the domain of language proper
and therefore little attention is usually paid to pragmatics from
other sides of linguistics.
        The proposed panel will assess this situation, examining ways in
which cognitive pragmatics can be thought to carry implications for
more ‘core’ research within linguistics. To this end, alongside the
obvious area of the semantics/pragmatics interface, equal attention
will be paid to the corresponding syntax/pragmatics and
phonology/pragmatics interfaces. In this setting, the panel’s main
objective will be to promote the idea that syntacticians, semanticists
and phonologists alike can gain significant benefits from the
implementation of pragmatics research in their own area and that
linguistics as a whole should not blindly downplay the role that
cognitive pragmatics plays in our understanding of language as a
cognitive capacity."

If anyone is interested in this, please contact me directly with a
potential topic. Do keep in mind that the panel will include talks
from eminent scholars, so the proposed talk would certainly need to be
of a high standard. Thank you in advance for your time and apologies
for the urgency of this message. I just thought it would be a pity to
leave a slot empty in such an international event on pragmatics.

Kind regards,
Stavros

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Postdoctoral Investigator
Department of Philosophy I
University of Granada
------------------------------------
http://www.ugr.es/~stavros/