Friday, April 6th, 9:00-4:30;
Saturday, April 7th, 9:00-12:00
Organized by Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm (OSU)
and Andrea Golato (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Sponsored by a College of Arts and Sciences Research Enhancement Award
This symposium concentrates on reference to objects, space, time, and location, as well as the role that prosody and gesture play in referential work in oral discourse. Contributions from different language families allow for cross-linguistic comparisons identifying universal principles of reference but also cultural variability. The symposium will include invited speakers whose research has engaged some aspects of reference in conversation in Farsi, French, Fulfulde, German, Japanese, Korean, and Transylvanian German. The main goal of this symposium is to provide a forum for the contributors to share their recent findings in their respected language and to engage in a discussion about interdisciplinary questions of language use and cultural variability of human sociality.
Some of the research questions to be addressed at the symposium are:
- Are references to objects, time, and location constructed differently in interaction than person reference? How?
- Which role do prosody and gesture have in referential work?
- Which features of referencing are universal, which are variable across languages or language families?
- What can we say about the cultural organization of the reference system?
Participants:
Tobias Barske (University of Wisconsin)
Emma Betz (Kansas State University)
Andrea Golato (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Makoto Hayashi (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Hye Ri "Stephanie" Kim (UCLA)
Hina (Hie-Jung) You (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm (Ohio State)
