CALL FOR PAPERS

A central question in the field of developmental pragmatics is how children learn to understand and use figurative expressions, such as metaphor (She is my sunshine), metonymy (The violin is late for rehearsal) and irony ([on a rainy day] Lovely weather today!). Figurative language is challenging for children because what is said (the ‘literal’ meaning) differs from what is communicated (the figurative meaning). Previous developmental studies indicate that children understand metaphors and metonyms before ironical utterances. This difference is not explained by the standard pragmatic account that analyzes all kinds of figurative language as conversational implicatures triggered by blatant violations of the Maxim of Quality (Grice, 1967). However, contemporary pragmatic theories, which consider irony a form of echo (Wilson & Sperber, 1981) or pretense (Clark & Gerrig, 1984), set irony clearly apart from other kinds of figurative uses such as metaphor and metonymy.

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers from different fields and theoretical backgrounds who work on figurative language development and related topics. One central question is whether metaphor, metonymy, irony and other kinds of figurative uses have a similar developmental trajectory and are processed in a similar way. We especially encourage papers that link theoretical and empirical research, for instance by conducting theoretically informed empirical studies or by empirically testing and comparing the predictions of existing pragmatic theories.

Keynote speakers

• Eve Clark (Stanford)
• Herbert Colston (University of Alberta)
• Penny Pexman (University of Calgary)
• Nausicaa Pouscoulous (University College London)
• Gabriella Rundblad (King’s College London)
• Deirdre Wilson (University College London)

We invite authors to submit an anonymous, max. 500 words long abstract for a talk of 20 minutes plus 10-minute discussion or a poster. Submissions should be made via Easychair. We welcome theoretically and empirically oriented contributions addressing some of the following topics of interest:

• Children’s processing, comprehension and production of figurative language, including (but not limited to) irony, metonymy, metaphor and hyperbole
• Typical and atypical development of figurative language processing, comprehension and production
• Theoretical accounts of figurative language
• Figurative language and its relation to cognitive and affective abilities (such as Theory of Mind, epistemic vigilance, metalinguistic awareness, emotion understanding)
• The relationship between figurative language and lexical innovation
• Figurative language in second language acquisition

Important dates

• Submission deadline: 19 May 2017
• Notification of acceptance: June 2017
• Conference: October 5-6, 2017

Link for submission

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=afm2017

Organization

Ingrid Falkum & Franziska Köder

Funded by The Research Council of Norway, as part of the FRIPRO scheme for Young Research Talents (project no. 240324).