13-14 September, Namur
Following on from a first international Round Table on Communicative Dynamism held in Cardiff in September 2014, the University of Namur is pleased to be able to host a follow-up meeting on 13 and 14 September, focusing on information structure in terms of its categories and its interaction with the semantics and grammar of constructions.
A brief general description is included below, and further information, including the full programme and abstracts, is available on our website at http://dynamism.unamur.be/. Anyone who would like to attend is kindly requested to register via the web form at http://dynamism.unamur.be/practical/registration no later than 31 August. There is a registration fee of 25 euros covering both days and including coffee breaks and light lunches. Doctoral students who are interested in (theoretical and methodological) questions surrounding information structure are especially welcome; should you supervise any who might be interested, please do pass on the information.
With many thanks and best wishes on behalf of the organizing committee,
Lieven Vandelanotte
About this round table:
This round table focuses on linguistic mechanisms to structure information in clauses and in texts. Information structure is an essential layer of linguistic organization both in its own right and in interaction with morphosyntax and semantics. However, current approaches to information structure suffer from highly divergent terminology and conceptualization.
This round table assumes the theoretical tenets of functional linguists such as Firbas, Halliday, Dik and Sinclair, and has a strong empirical, data-driven orientation. Some papers seek to elucidate the categories of information structure that are still ill understood such as theme-rheme, given-new, and focus. Other papers investigate the interface between information structure, grammar and semantics in specific constructions. The round table is thus of interest to anyone interested in developing replicable analyses of information structure, which identify the components of information units, and larger sequences, in speech and writing.
The first round table was organized by Tom Bartlett and Gerard O’Grady at Cardiff University in September 2014, and a selection of papers from this event appeared in June 2016 as a special issue of the journal English Text Construction on « The dynamicity of communication below, around and above the clause« , edited by Ben Clarke (University of Portsmouth) and Jorge Arús Hita (Universidad Complutense de Madrid).
