RT list: Conference on Procedural Meaning

PROCEDURAL MEANING: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES

International Conference

Madrid, October 15-17, 2009

*http://www.uned.es/proceduralmeaning*

Conference Announcement

The distinction between conceptual and procedural content, which represents
a new view on other classic characterisations, is a major component of
Relevance Theory. According to Wilson and Sperber (1993: 1), an utterance
can be expected "to encode two basic types of information: representational
and computational, or conceptual and procedural –that is, information about
the representations to be manipulated, and information about how to
manipulate them."

Research on procedural content has already produced very noteworthy results
in many areas. However, there are still a number of questions that require
further clarification and more detailed analysis. The conference is intended
to be a meeting point for those working on procedural meaning from different
points of view and to identify new challenges that will determine the
directions for research in the next few years.

The conference call encourages the presentation of contributions in three
main areas: theoretical, analytical-descriptive and experimental.

Within the theoretical focus, enquiries on topics such as the following
would be appropriate:
· the distinction between conceptual and procedural content
· theoretical characterization of procedural content, its defining features,
nature and status
· the type of units that encode these contents
· the relationship between procedural content and grammatical categories
· the differences between procedural content that contributes to explicit
content and that which contributes to implicatures
· diachronic processes in the emergence of procedural meaning
· the relationship between semantic change and grammaticalization
· the existence of universal restrictions on the type of procedural content
that can be encoded in a language
· the consequences of all of these characterizations for semantic and
pragmatic theory and the interface between grammar and pragmatics.

Analytical and descriptive proposals could be related to any kind of
linguistic unit or aspect of grammar with procedural content, including:
· pronouns
· nominal reference
· deixis
· discourse anaphora
· affective meaning
· tense and temporal reference
· mood
· aspect
· modality
· evidentiality
· word order and information structure
· the procedural function of prosody
· discourse markers,

Any of the above topics would allow for treatment in experimental terms;
thus, the following types of investigations are equally welcome:
· neurological or psychological research contributing reliable data on
processing effort in the computation of procedural content
· brain areas involved in processing this kind of content and types of
inferential processes,
· computational models
· experimental studies on acquisition of procedural content both in L1 and
L2
· experimental studies supporting the establishment or bases of significant
correlations among the different points in the areas of focus mentioned
above
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*Invited Speakers*

· Diane Blakemore (U. Salford)

· Bruce Fraser (U. Boston)

· Thorstein Fretheim (U. Trondheim)

· Daniel Wedgwood (U. Edinburgh)

· Deirdre Wilson (University College London)

Call for Papers

 The conference will consist in a limited number of plenary oral
presentations and a general poster session. Papers are invited for 30-minute
presentations plus 15-minute discussion (or for the poster session) on
topics related to any of the conference areas.

 Abstract Submission:

Abstracts submitted must represent original, unpublished research. An author
may submit at most one single and one joint abstract. Each abstract will be
blind reviewed by 3 members of the Scientific Committee.The official
language of the conference will be English.

Authors are requested to submit an anonymous copy of the abstract of their
contribution as a .txt, .doc, .pdf, or .odt document through the following
link:

 http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/procedural2009

The text of the abstract should fit on two A4 pages, and should not include
the authors' names and affiliations: avoid self-references that may reveal
the authors' identities. Papers that do not conform to these requirements
will be rejected without review.

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline: February 28th, 2009.

Notifications regarding acceptance: May 1st, 2009.

*More information * *
http://www.uned.es/proceduralmeaning*
*procedural.meaning@gmail.com*
Received on Thu Nov 13 08:49:36 2008