DisCorX 2020: Discourse in corpus and experimental data: bridging the methodological gap University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK, October 15-16, 2020 |
Conference website | https://www.edweb.ed.ac.uk/ppls/linguistics-and-english-language/events/workshop-2020-10-15 |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=discorx2020 |
Submission deadline | April 10, 2020 |
Discourse analysis, understood here as the study of discourse-level processes such as coherence relations and their markers, is a rich multidisciplinary field of linguistic research that has been explored through cognitive corpus linguistics and psycholinguistic experiments (among others). Both methods have contributed greatly to furthering our knowledge of the types of linguistic elements that help signal coherence relations, their forms and functions, the factors that influence the use of such signals and their effect on processing and comprehension.
Multi-method approaches are highly fruitful: corpus studies help describe a complex reality and provide hypotheses to be tested in more controlled experiments, where well-defined variables can be manipulated and further cognitive factors can be accessed. The combination of these two methods seems to attract more attention (e.g. Mak et al., 2013; Zufferey & Gygax, 2015), although it remains fairly limited in the field. This methodological gap is mostly due to the different (and partly incompatible) techniques and requirements that each paradigm involves.
The DisCorX 2020 workshop intends to gather linguists, psycholinguists and psychologists who investigate spoken and written discourse through a (direct or indirect) combination of corpus-based and experimental methods. The focus is on coherence relations and their signals. The aim of the workshop is to share state-of-the-art research on discourse production and processing. In doing so, methodological issues will be discussed, covering the affordances and limitations of corpus-based and experimental approaches to discourse. We hope that this workshop will be an opportunity to share best practices and to further encourage multidisciplinarity and triangulation of results.
Submission Guidelines
We encourage submissions of abstracts for 20-minute presentations (+ 10 minutes for questions). All papers must involve both corpus-based and experimental methods, at least partly or indirectly. Abstracts can be up to 500-word long (excluding references). Please use editable formats (.doc/.docx) and submit your abstract via Easychair by 10th April 2020.
List of Topics
We encourage submissions on the following topics:
- categories of coherence relations;
- categories of discourse signals;
- polyfunctionality, ambiguity, information density;
- “implicit” vs “explicit” relations;
- discourse production;
- processing and comprehension;
- perception and acceptability.
We also invite papers specifically targeting methodological issues:
- what are the benefits and limitations of corpus-based approaches to discourse?
- what are the benefits and limitations of experimental approaches to discourse?
- how (far) can they be combined?
Organization
Organizer: Dr Ludivine Crible
Invited Speaker
Pr. Sandrine Zufferey (Universität Bern)
Pr. Ted J. M. Sanders (Universiteit Utrecht)
Venue
The conference will be held at the University of Edinburgh (George Square).
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to Ludivine Crible at ludivine.crible@ed.ac.uk