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Events & Conferences

Here you can find past and current events and conferences: 

  • Call for papers: How much is too much? The one-new-idea constraint and related phenomena at the information-intonation interface

    Deadline for Abstracts: 15th March 2024
    Acceptance Notification: 05 April 2024

    This workshop invites contributions researching the packaging of information relative to intonation units. Seminal studies including Chafe (1979, 1994), Givón (1983), and Pawley & Syder (1983) have suggested universal cognitive constraints on how much new information may be expressed in a prosodic chunk, e.g. Chafe’s “one new idea constraint”. Despite their wide-reaching implications, and their impact on fields including discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and typology, these claims still largely await testing for more languages as well as discourse types.

    This workshop aims to bring together researchers empirically testing the one-new-idea constraint and related topics at the information-intonation interface. This may include research on information packaging in prosodic units other than the intonation unit or on types of information that have received less attention in the literature. We particularly welcome contributions on lesser studied languages in an effort to probe the claimed universality of the proposed constraints. We also welcome diverse methodological approaches including, but not limited to, corpus-linguistic, experimental, discourse-analysis or interactional-linguistic approaches.

    Invited researchers include Nikolaus Himmelmann (Cologne), Pavel Ozerov (Innsbruck) and Stefan Schnell (Zurich).

    Date: 12th-13th July 2024
    Location: University of Freiburg, Germany
    Organizers: Uta Reinöhl, Naomi Peck

    Please submit your abstract by 15th of March 2024 to: naomi.peck@linguistik.uni-freiburg.de



    Chafe, Wallace. 1979. The flow of thought and the flow of language. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Discourse and syntax, 159–181. New York: Academic Press.

    Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: the flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Givón, Talmy (ed.). 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: a quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.

    Pawley, Andrew & Frances Hodgetts Syder. 1983. Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Jack C. Richards & Richard

    W Schmidt (eds.), Language and communication, 191–225. London: Longman.

  • Lecture series "Language, Communication & Cognition" 
  • Exhibition: "Zur Sprache kommen: Visualising Research on Endangered Languages"
  • Other events can be found here.
  • 43rd DGfS Annual Conference 2021 (finished)
  • 17th STaPS 2021 (finished)