Syntax in Cognitive Grammar

Date: 09-Apr-2010 - 11-Apr-2010
Location: Cz?stochowa, Poland
Contact: Aleksandra Kalaga
Contact Email: olakalaga@wp.pl
Meeting URL: http://www.syncog.wsl.edu.pl

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Syntax

Meeting Description:

The College of Foreign Languages in Czestochowa, Department of English,
Faculty
of Linguistics, is pleased to announce the organisation of an international
conference

Syntax in Cognitive Grammar
Czestochowa, Poland
April 9-11, 2010

Most older students of linguistics remember that cognitive grammar, as it
emerged in the 1980s from the work of R. Langacker, G. Lakoff, L. Talmy, C.
Fillmore and others, was at first concerned with such issues as the
cognitive/conceptual foundations of linguistic categories and semantics,
cognitive models and frames, prototype theory applied to linguistic
categorization and metaphor. With the focus on meaning, relatively little
attention was paid to the formal aspects of language, especially syntax.
Increasingly more studies of traditional syntactic phenomena appeared in the
nineties, particularly after the publication of R. Langacker's second volume
of
Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. Soon this new 'cognitive syntax' took
a
slightly different turn and gained a new momentum after A. Goldberg
published
her Stanford dissertation and C. Fillmore, in cooperation with P. Kay,
started
to work out the principles and formalism of construction grammar. As a
result,
Langackerian cognitive grammar and various versions of construction grammar
now
offer sophisticated theories of grammatical structure, which make it
possible to
describe a growing number of traditional as well as new aspects of the
formal
structure of language, viewed as a symbolic unity of form and meaning. We
hope
that the conference will provide a suitable forum in which researchers of
different cognitive and functional persuasions can present their ideas and
proposals concerning syntactic theory within the broad cognitive paradigm as
well as studies of particular grammatical problems within the cognitive and
functional frameworks.

Languages of the conference: English and Polish

Conference website: syncog@wsl.edu.pl

Plenary lectures:

Miriam Fried - two plenary lectures on the priciples of construction grammar
Constructional Syntax
Jaako Leino - Grammatical constructions and discourse
Bogus?aw Bierwiaczonek - Metonymy in syntax

The main areas of interest for the conference are:

Morphology viewed as a study of single word constructions
Idioms as constructions
Phrasal, sentential and other constructions in the world's languages
Long-distance dependencies in constructions
Functional and pragmatic components of constructions
Constructions in discourse
Constructional polysemy
Diachronic construction grammar
Acquisition of syntax
Grammaticalization in cognitive grammar
Contrastive construction grammar
Cognitive grammar vs. construction grammar vs. functional grammar vs.
conceptual
grammar
Metonymy, metaphor and conceptual blending in syntax