SILF 2024
45th International Colloquium of Functional Linguistics
The colloquium will focus on three main themes: Language and the Media, Europe as a Mosaic of Languages, and Grammaticalization and Dynamic Synchrony. The organizers have also prepared another specific theme, namely a workshop on semiology.
Date: Octobre 2-5, 2024
Location: Faculty of Arts, UP Olomouc, Křížkovského 512/10
Languagee: French, English, Czech
Organizers: SILF (International Society for Functional Linguistics), CEFRES, Olomouc Section of the Linguistic Association of the Czech Republic
Main themes of the colloquium
Topic 1: LANGUAGE AND THE MEDIA
Print media, radio, television, the Internet, social networks . . . All the media bring daily a superabundance of information, whether reliable or misleading, while recent advances in artificial intelligence have introduced new forms of communication, for example ChatGPT offering conversations between a human and a machine.
Topic 2: THE EUROPE OF LANGUAGES
Is Europe a mosaic of separate languages, or a melting pot of languages in contact, naturally influencing each other, where lexical items are transferred from one language to another? The languages lend and borrow constantly, with some words stuck in transit . . . Does linguistic similarity ensure mutual intelligibility? The special case of place names: to keep the original form, or translate?
Plurilingualism facing globalisation: can we diagnose the beginnings of an international vocabulary?
Topic 3: GRAMMATICALISATION AND DYNAMIC SYNCHRONY
In the context of dynamic synchrony, grammaticalization enables a lexical unit to become a grammatical unit at the syntactic level. This thematic session will provide an opportunity to examine whether the original use disappears or is maintained, and how the new grammatical units fit semantically into the paradigm of their syntactic functions. Moreover, it will explore specific contexts when grammaticalization results in a new use similar to that of phatèmes (phatic expressions) at the pragmatic level.
Workshop (in English and French): FUNCTIONAL SEMIOLOGY – PAST AND PRESENT
The functional linguistics project as outlined by André Martinet was successfully developed into a fuctional semiology by notable linguists as Luis J. Prieto, Georges Mounin, Eric Buyssens, Jeanne Martinet and Anne-Marie Houdebine in the second half
of the twentieth century. Recent developments in both linguistics and semiotics, however, call for a revision of both the theoretical foundations of such a semiological project and of the outcomes it can still provide to contemporary semiotics and to linguistic research as framed within semiology (an implicit tenet of Martinet’s
functionalism). The present workshop will thus welcome presentations on the history of functional semiology, and of the actuality of its methods when applied to current
fields of semiotics, from semiotics of culture to bio and cognitive semiotics.
Find the full program of the colloquium here.