International Workshop: Language in Social Interaction 2 (LISI 2)
17 July 2025 - University of Wuppertal - Campus Grifflenberg
The University of Wuppertal will be organizing the second international workshop Language in Social Interaction (LISI 2) on 17 July 2025.
The aim of this bi-annual event is to bring together researchers who study language as a social phenomenon (rather than from the perspective of a single speaker) and to discuss how an interactional perspective may enrich existing theories of language and language change as well as research approaches, models and frameworks.
This time we will organize two consecutive topical sections, one for the study of language in social interaction from a historical perspective and another one studying social interaction from a modern, present-day perspective. We invite papers from both historical linguists dealing with social and socio-pragmatic aspects of language development (e.g. historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics) and from linguists or sociologists dealing with language in social interaction from a modern perspective, e.g. based on pragmatic, (neuro-)cognitive, discourse analytic, conversation analytic or sociolinguistic approaches.
Plenary speakers
Prof. Simona Pekarek Doehler, University of Neuchâtel
Prof. Olga Timofeeva, University of Zurich
Meeting Description
There has been a long tradition of describing language use, grammar and conversation from the viewpoint of an individual speaker’s mind outside the world of social interaction. This interactional “offline” perspective on linguistic cognition and interaction, which feeds into processing mechanisms residing “inside” the individual speaker, has recently been questioned and expanded to include an “online” perspective on the speaker in concrete social interaction, which pays tribute to the interaction dynamics between speakers and the responsive character of language use in interactional encounters.
By focusing on recent research in interaction-oriented linguistics and related areas, this workshop seeks to bring together contributions to gain new insights into language-related aspects of social interaction, moving away from the individual-based perspective toward an interaction-based perspective. This includes:
1. understanding to which extent particular linguistic resources (e.g. address terms, discourse markers, backchannels, interjections, attention getters, response elicitors, prosody) and practices (e.g. turn co-constructions, collaborative actions) contribute to the interaction dynamics between agents,
2. understanding the cognitive mechanisms and processes involved in the temporary coupling of two minds engaged in conversational interaction (e.g. interactive alignment/synchronization; establishing common ground; conversational coordination, discourse processing, Theory of Mind),
3. understanding the role of dialogicity and interaction in foreign language learning (e.g. acquisition of pragmatic competence or non-standard features of language),
4. understanding the role of interaction in specific forms of language change (e.g. pragmatic changes, pragmaticalization or discoursization, socio-historical variation, changes in patterns of interaction leading to such effects as subjectification or conventionalization of language).
Format
20 minutes talk + 15 minutes for discussion;
language used for presentations and in the discussions: English
Practical information
Conference venue: University of Wuppertal, Germany (Campus Grifflenberg)
Workshop date: 17 July 2025
Organization: Alexander Haselow, Elzbieta Adamczyk
Any questions related to the workshop can be sent to: <language2024[at]uni-wuppertal.de>
Submission of Abstracts
Abstracts should be anonymous and no more than one side of A4, including references.
They should be sent to the following address in PDF format: language2024[at]uni-wuppertal.de
Please include the following information in the main body of your email: title and name of author(s); affiliation; email address for correspondence; presentation title; 3-5 keywords.
Submission Deadline: February 28, 2025.
Notification of acceptance will be sent to the authors in early April 2025.
Program
The program will be published here.
