Call for papers

Tammerkoski rapids by night

Call for papers

Meaning is a crucial concept in many areas of linguistics research as well as outside linguistics. It is a core concept in semantics and pragmatics, but it can also be approached from various angles, such as social interaction, language learning, translation, interpreting and many other language-related phenomena, thus making it multidisciplinary in nature. In interactional research and conversation analysis, meaning is often conceptualized as action, something that the participants do and build together. In translation and interpreting studies, the notion of meaning is inherent to discussions on equivalence, skopos and the contextuality of meaning. In psycholinguistics, meaning is at the heart of questions on understanding language. In philosophy and semiotics, meaning is conceptualized more as a sign or system of signs. Meaning also combines language with visual or other perceptions. It can be conceptualized as an entity, a phenomenon, or as a relation between language and thought. Meaning can be the center of both empirical and philosophical enquiry.

More recently, meaning has emerged as an essential concept in the fields of language technology, AI and machine learning. As a result of functional applications of language use and of the interface between machines and humans, they have brought up both old and new considerations of meaning, such as intentionality.

The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers from different traditions, working with topics related to meaning. We hope the symposium will provide a common forum for all researchers interested in meaning but looking at it from different angles, so as to encourage new combinations of ideas and new vantage points to meaning.

 

Presentations may relate to (but are not restricted to) the following themes:

  • semantics, both formal and functional approaches
  • pragmatics and language use
  • interaction research and interactional semantics
  • Interpersonal communication and listening research
  • language acquisition and language proficiency
  • translation and interpreting studies
  • psycholinguistics and understanding language
  • easy language and language design
  • theories of meaning
  • language philosophy and semiotics
  • machine translation
  • language models
  • natural language understanding (by machines)
  • spoken language understanding (by machines)
  • grounded speech and language models
  • discourse and dialogue modeling
  • automatic summarization

 

Submission Guidelines

The following paper categories are welcome:

  • Presentations (The talks will be 30 minutes long: 20 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion.)
  • Posters

Language of the proposals and symposium is English. Yet, we engourage to present data, perspectives and examples of multiple languages.

 

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline: April 22, 2025.

Notifications of acceptance: May 31, 2025.

Symposium: October 2-3, 2025

 

 

 

 

Credits of the photo: Maija Tervola