Short Title: PrepComp 2021
Date: 29-Sep-2021 – 02-Oct-2021
Location: Toulouse, France
Contact Person: Dejan Stosic
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: https://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/prepcomp2021/
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Lexicography; Semantics; Syntax; Typology
Subject Language(s): French
Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2021
Meeting Description:
The international conference of French and contrastive linguistics ”Complex prepositions in French: Theories, descriptions, applications” will explore multi-word expressions that are half-way between the lexicon and grammar such as ”à travers” ‘through’, ”au bord de” ‘on the edge of’, ”en dépit de” ‘in spite of’, ”par rapport à” ‘with respect to’, ”à l’instar de” ‘like’, ”en ce qui concerne” ‘concerning’, etc. This conference will be the first to be exclusively dedicated to complex prepositions in French, while strongly encouraging insights from cross-linguistic studies.
Originating in an international research project on the more general category of complex adpositions in European Languages (cf. Fagard, Pinto de Lima & Stosic (Eds) 2019, Fagard, Pinto de Lima, Stosic & Smirnova (Eds) 2020), the conference is intended both to provide an update on the topic and to open up new perspectives in the analysis of complex prepositions in French, and more broadly, on the theoretical level, in the description of this recalcitrant word sub-class.
Important dates:
Abstract submission deadline: February 28, 2021
Notification of acceptance: May 10–15, 2021
Registration: May 24–June 25, 2021
Conference: September 29–October 2, 2021
Invited speakers:
Ludo Melis (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Walter De Mulder (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Benjamin Fagard (LATTICE, Paris, France)
Organizers:
Dejan Stosic (Toulouse, France)
Myriam Bras (Toulouse, France)
Chiara Minoccheri (Toulouse, France)
Océane Abrard (Toulouse, France)
Sasa Marjanovic (Belgrade, Serbia)
Veran Stanojevic (Belgrade, Serbia)
Call for Papers:
General scope of the conference:
The purpose of the conference is twofold: Firstly, it aims to promote recent advances and to stimulate new research in the area of complex prepositions, whatever the approach, by enabling rich interactions between experts. Secondly, the conference aims to arouse interest and to create a relevant dynamics within several applicative domains (Lexicography, Natural Language Processing, Human and automatic translation, Teaching French as a first, second or foreign language).
Main topics:
Given the general scope of the conference as sketched above, communications can cover, but are not limited to, the following topics, with possible cross-linguistic perspectives comparing the system of complex prepositions in French with systems of complex adpositions in other languages:
1) Definitional issues about which multi-word expressions do and do not belong to the sub-class of complex prepositions. Renewal of methods and approaches, with the ultimate objective of answering the question where the boundaries of the complex adposition category should be drawn. In this respect, all theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome for establishing a reliable set of criteria to build the inventory of complex prepositions in French (cf. Gaatone 1976, Borillo 1997, 2000, Adler 2001, 2008, Melis 2003, Leeman 2007, Lauwers 2014, Stosic & Fagard 2019).
2) Syntax and morphology of complex prepositions in French, with a special focus on the alleged distributional equivalence between simple and complex prepositions.
3) Range of meanings expressed by complex prepositions in French (cf. Gross 2006), or in comparison with other languages (European, non-European, regional, Creoles, etc.); Polysemy of complex prepositions and modeling of their senses;
4) Emergence, formation and evolution of complex prepositions in French (cf. Fagard 2010, 2012, Blumenthal & Vigier (Eds) 2017, Fagard et al. 2020); Grammaticalization, lexicalization, constructionalization (cf. Hoffmann 2005, Fagard & De Mulder 2007, Lehmann 2019, Fagard et al. (Eds) 2020).
5) Complex prepositions / adpositions across languages: What similarities or differences, or what complex adpositions of other languages, in contact with French or not, can tell us about complex prepositions in French, either in synchrony or in diachrony?
6) Complex prepositions as a very specific kind of multi-word expressions. Are the criteria and methods of identification of verbal or nominal multi-word expressions, either traditional or recent ones, suitable for and transposable to complex prepositions (cf. Lamiroy 2008, Lamiroy & Klein 2005, Ramisch 2012, 2015, Constant et al. 2017, Ramisch et al. 2018, Savary 2019, Savary et al. 2019)?
7) Neuro-psychological issues. Acquisition of complex prepositions in general, and compared to the acquisition of simple prepositions, by normal subjects, or by subjects with developmental pathologies; Primacy of certain conceptual domains during the acquisition of complex prepositions; Longitudinal studies dealing with various monolingual or bilingual populations.
8) NLP issues. Complex prepositions, one of the Achilles heels of NLP? How can big language data corpora and new NLP approaches contribute to improving and consolidating inventories of complex prepositions? What are the most suitable NLP tools and methods for indexing them? (cf. Litkowski 2017a, b); Complex prepositions as a challenge for automatic translation.
9) Lexicographical description of complex prepositions in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries (cf. Heinz 1993, Ucherek 2019); Benefits of corpus-based lexicography for the elaboration of dictionary entries for complex prepositions (cf. Roberts & Montgomery 1996, Teubert 2002, Lindemann 2013, Zavaglia & Galafacci 2014, Litkowski 2017a, Marjanovic et al. 2018).
10) From theory to application. Complex prepositions in teaching French as a first, second or foreign language; CP translation, and translation studies.
Submission details:
The official languages of the conference are French and English.
Two forms of communication are possible: oral presentation or poster.
For both oral presentations (20 min + 10 min for questions) and posters, we invite submissions of extended abstracts of 6,000–9,000 characters (including spaces; Times New Roman 12; excluding references). Proposals, in French or English, should be anonymous, and submitted in one of the following formats: Microsoft Word (.docx), Open Office (.odt), or PDF.
All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by (at least) two reviewers.
Abstracts should be sent to the following address: colloque.prepcomp2021univ-tlse2.fr
In the subject line of the message, please write: ‘Abstract’.
In the body of the email, please include:
– title of the abstract,
– intended format of communication (oral presentation or poster),
– author name(s),
– academic affiliation(s),
– contact information (e-mail and postal address(es)),
– academic status (professor, researcher, PhD student…)
PhD students and young scholars are strongly encouraged to submit proposals for the conference. A selection of papers will be published in a collective volume.
Communications can consist of case studies, deal with a sub-group of complex prepositions, or have a more general descriptive or theoretical scope. Studies can explore written or spoken data, coming either from general language use, or from specialized languages, or be based on any other kind of specific data providing new and original insights into the functioning of complex prepositions in French.