iMean 4@Warwick: 09th -11th April 2015

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The i-mean 4 conference will address the relationship between Language and Impact

Conference aims:

‘Impact’ has become a buzz word and is increasingly used as a criterion for decisions on research policy and research funding. The impact of linguistic research has been particularly visible in a number of areas including but not limited to language variation and change, language and politics, language policy and language use, language and identity (e.g. in relation to professional identity, gender, ethnicity or age), corporate and health care discourse, leadership and teamwork and linguistic vitality among others. The impact of the different epistemological and methodological approaches and the impact of the language of impact, however, are more rarely addressed.

I-mean 4 aims to take a critical approach to impact and examine:

• The impact of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the development of the field and certain key topic areas (e.g. language and identity, language and culture, language and meaning)
• The impact of sociopragmatic and discourse analytic research outside academia
• The impact and application of linguistic methodologies and analyses in social sciences
• The impact of social interaction on language change synchronically and diachronically

Invited Plenary Speakers:

• Johannes Angermuller, University of Warwick
• Paul Baker, Lancaster University
• Deborah Cameron, University of Oxford
• Penny Eckert, Stanford University
• Rick Iedema, University of Tasmania
• Klaus Schneider, Bonn University
• Zhu Hua, Birkbeck, University of London

For titles and abstracts please see here

In line with the iMean tradition, the conference aims to encourage multidisciplinary thinking and to create new pathways in linguistic research.

The conference will, as usual, include two invited Colloquia, specialist Panels and a summative Round Table at which the keynote speakers are invited to debate the conference theme.

Conference Themes:

• The impact of widely used frameworks on the understanding of language use and negotiation of meaning
• The impact of different methodological approaches to spoken data, including Ethnomethodology, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, multivariate analysis, Discourse Completion Tasks, (modified) matched-guise tests and multi-modal analysis
• The impact of the popularization of the internet on research methodologies, traditions and ethics
• The impact of globalisation on the study of language and culture
• The impact of mobility on multilingualism in professional settings
• The impact of constructionist and post modern approaches on the study of the relationship between language and identity
• The impact of language and gender studies on the discourses of gender and sexuality
• The impact of sociopragmatic studies on language teaching and learning
• The impact of critical approaches on language and politics
• The impact of language policy on language use

Call for Papers:

Papers are invited from researchers working across different linguistic fields and traditions, focusing on any aspect of language and impact.