Cognitive Linguistics aims for a cognitively plausible assumption of what it means to know a language, to know how cognitive mechanisms like memory and categorization are used during language behavior. It aims to develop psychologically viable models of language and to study the way we perceive and conceptualize our experience of the world (Taylor 2003; Sinha 2014). Processes of categorization grew out of the works of a number of researchers who are interested in the relation between language and mind and who developed general patterns by examining cognitive principles of human categorization dealing with meaning construction and knowledge representation (Kutas & Federmeier 2000). This conference insists on linguistic categorization (clear and/or approximate), an inseparable part of the general field of cognitive linguistics, and aims to contribute to the global understanding of how categorization in different languages affects speakers’ perception. Finding the underlying mechanisms of categorization processes and their linguistic expressions is also one of the conference’s main goals. With a view to clarification, this conference is open to all dimensions of the issue and welcomes proposals in monolingual or plurilingual perspectives, as well as synchronic and diachronic ones, relevant to the following axes: match between a construction and a semantic specification (syntax-semantics interface), importance of nominal typologies, use of metalinguistic nouns in dictionaries,formants of words related to categorization or approximation meaning, ad hoc categories and approximation,comparison of intralingual and interlingual markers of categorization/approximation... Papers regarding more general questions on the very notions of identification, representation, classification, categorization and approximation are equally appreciated (cf. Call for papers).
The conference falls under Scolias’s (EA 1339 LiLPa) research project Nominals and fits into the Project PHC Osmose De la Taxinomie à l’approximation dans les langues naturelles funded by the Ministry of Europe, Foreign Affairs & Higher Education, Research & Innovation (MESRI). In collaboration with Greek and Latvian researchers from GEO (research team on Oriental Studies, University of Strasbourg) and from Riga’s Romance Studies Department respectively.
References
Feldermeier, K.D. & Kutas, M. (2001), Meaning and Modality: influences of context, semantic memory organization and perceptual predictability on picture processing, Journal of Experimental Psychology 27, 202-224.
Sinha Kanhaiya K. (2014), Cognitive Linguistics: a brief introduction, International Journal of research in Social Sciences And Humanities 3: II, 17-20.
Taylor, J.R. (2003), Cognitive Grammar, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
