ElPaCo goes to Cologne for DGfS

The Annual Conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachforschung is one of the larger linguistics conferences in Germany. This year, ElPaCo will be represented in the form of a plenary talk by PI Mark Dingemanse and a contribution to the special session on creativity and routine in interaction (AG4) by postdocs Andreas Liesenfeld and Marlou Rasenberg.

Abstract of Dingemanse’s plenary lecture:

When we laud the supreme generativity and expressivity of language, we rarely stop to think about the full range of resources that underpin it. Received views tend to focus on our remarkable mental capacities for composition and decomposition, a cognitivist perspective that makes it easy to overlook the contributions of public interaction. In this talk I presents some results from a research programme that tries to round out the picture by exploring how language is shaped by and for social interaction. I sketch how interjections —long overlooked as mere performance— are streamlined and conventionalized tools that help streamline linguistic interaction and scaffold language development. I also show how interactional resources like repair and continuers provide us with an infrastructure to balance creativity and convention in turn-by-turn interaction. The research I report on is part of the NWO-funded project Elementary Particles of Conversation and represents joint work with colleagues including Marieke Woensdregt, Andreas Liesenfeld, Marlou Rasenberg and Ada Lopez.

Update

We made many new connections, saw some old friends, and took some pictures.