Symposium "Aspects of Spoken Discourse"
October 4th-5th, 2024
Thessaloniki
The Institute of Modern Greek Studies [Manolis Triandaphyllidis Foundation] of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is pleased to announce its upcoming Symposium on Aspects of Spoken Discourse on 4-5 October 2024 in Thessaloniki (Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation of AUTH). The Symposium is organized in the framework of the Institute’s activities on spoken Greek and the research project Greek Talk-in-interaction and Conversation Analysis. It aims to investigate various aspects of the Greek language in spoken communication and shed light on issues and challenges regarding the interface between system/grammar and use/interaction.
As in the past, this year’s symposium (fourth in line) will also host a number of talks in other languages so that the Greek data can be situated in a cross-linguistic perspective. The keynote speakers of the Symposium will be:
Prof. Galina Bolden (Rutgers University, USA),
Prof. Geoffrey Raymond (University of California at Santa Barbara, USA).
Despite the Symposium’s origins in Conversation Analysis, no particular theoretical and/or methodological approach is presupposed for the acceptance of a paper– as long as it is grounded on natural data from audio- or video-recordings. Thematic areas from which topics can be drawn are indicatively:
- • initiating (e.g. informing) and responsive (e.g. receipt of information) actions,
- • action design in particular sequential environments,
- • morphosyntactic, prosodic, etc. variation of actions,
- • the synergy between nods, gestures, gaze, etc. and speech (multimodality),
- • pragmatic particles (disourse markers, response particles, etc.),
- • repetition/reformulation,
- • basic sequences (e.g. question–answer–information receipt) and broader conversational activity (narration, argumentation, direction giving, etc.),
- • epistemic claims and deontic expectations,
- • self- and other-repair,
- • preference structures,
- • alignment and affiliation,
- • issues of interpersonal relations (politeness, impoliteness, face threatening, etc.),
- • construction of identities-collectivities,
- • subjectivity and intersubjectivity,
- • spoken language in bi-/multilinguistic environments,
- • spoken language and multimedia.
In connection with the Symposium, small-scale seminars on issues of application (presenting Greek data to a non-Greek speaking audience, translating Conversation Analysis terms into Greek, data sessions) are also planned. More information will be provided later.