Full Title: Methodological Perspectives on Communicative Functions

Date: 22-Aug-2008 - 26-Aug-2008
Location: Aarhus, Denmark
Contact Person: Sara Gesuato
Meeting Email: sara.gesuato@unipd.it
Web Site: http://www.esse2008.dk/cfp_seminars.html

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2008

Meeting Description:

ESSE Seminar S.15
The notion of communicative function is invoked in discourse studies to
define
speech acts, genres, text types, and to account for macro/micro properties
of
linguistic constructs like their rhetorical structure, lexical encoding, and
addresser-addressee's role-relationships. Yet, it is an elusive notion,
which
may refer to: language's role in interaction, a text's purpose, the
addresser's
illocutionary intent, an utterance/move's semantic contribution to a
communicative exchange. We aim to trace a standard characterization of the
notion of function by exploring the relationships between functions and the
encoding-decoding of meaning, and by discussing criteria for the definition,
identification and classification of functions.

Call for Papers

Those wishing to participate in the Seminar are invited to submit 200-word
abstracts of their proposed papers directly to all convenors of the seminar
in
question before 1 March 2008. The convenors will let the proponents know
whether
their proposals have been accepted no later than 21 March 2008. Please note
that
authors of seminar papers will be expected to give an oral presentation of
not
more than 15 minutes duration, rather than simply reading their papers
aloud.
The convenors will ensure that reduced versions of the papers are circulated
among all speakers in advance of the seminar in question. There will be a
maximum of 5 papers in each two-hour seminar session, and suitable time for
discussion between speakers and with the audience.

Convenors:
- Assoc. Prof. Sara Gesuato (University of Padua)
E-mail: sara.gesuato@unipd.it
- Assist. Prof. Francesca Bianchi (University of Salento)
E-mail: francesca.bianchi@ateneo.unile.it
- Dr. Josef Schmied (Chemnitz University)
E-mail: josef.schmied@phil.tu-chemnitz.de