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Call for Papers

Variation and Variability in the Language Sciences: Analysing, Measuring, Contextualising

The doctoral students in the Language Sciences laboratories at Toulouse University, France:

are organizing the fourth edition of JéTou (Journées d'études Toulousaines), an international conference aiming at gathering doctoral students and young researchers (who have defended their dissertation within the past three years) together, from the different disciplines of the Language Sciences, on an open and multidisciplinary theme. This 2013 edition will be devoted to a reflexion on the following theme: “Variation and Variability in the Language Sciences: Analysing, Measuring, Contextualising”.

The notions of variation and variability are central to various studies in the Language Sciences. The linguist can investigate these notions as a research object or focus on the methodological issues these same notions raise.

Variation as a research object offers a wide range of possible reflexions. It can bring specific and fundamental perspective to the studies in the Language Sciences, through theoretical, historical or sociological contextualisation for instance. Besides, finding one's positioning in relation to a norm, a standard or studying the constraints and structures that a norm, a standard can impose, are as many research directions linked to the concept of variability. With the recent development of corpus linguistics, which allows for the description, analysis and comparison of the linguistic systems of the different languages on a large scale, the issues of change, evolution, instability or uncertainty seem to be of crucial scientific importance.

On a more methodological level, taking variation and variability into account seems to be one of the essential issues for the Language Sciences. The linguist can ask himself whether he is selecting and using the best measuring tools or the accurate analytical frameworks (whether they are qualitative or quantitative). Many approaches and many protocols try to take the notion of variability into account, for example through codings and transcriptions, fieldwork investigations and interviews, statistical tools, softwares and computer programming, selection of variables…

Therefore, in order to encourage researchers in the different fields of the Language Sciences to make the theme of this 2013 edition of the JéTou their own, the contributions can focus on all the following issues:

Phonetics/phonology The notion of variation is relevant in phonetics and phonology through the comparison of the different varieties of language around the world. As far as inter and intra speaker variation is concerned, studying variation leads to comparing phonological and phonetic realizations within one specific group or several groups of individuals, based on sociological parameters, phonotactics, intonational contours, acoustics, etc. These potential analyses allow for the description of language dynamics and language evolution.
Morphology Variation can be studied both on the basis of derivational morphological phenomena (inter and intra paradigm: variation in stems and exponents, suppletion…) as well as on the basis of constructional morphological phenomena (outputs of word-formation processes or constructional patterns…).
Semantics Corpus linguistics, which focuses on the study of the structures that have meaning in language (from the lexical level to the discursive level) enables researchers to study phenomena involving variation and variability (between words, concepts, markers or syntactic, semantic and discursive structures) that can emerge from the oral vs. written discourse dichotomy or the general language vs. language for specific purposes (LSP) dichotomy. Variation can also be tackled diachronically, as far as the lexicon is concerned for instance (neologisms, shifts in meaning…) or as far as any level of linguistic description is concerned.
Psycholinguistics/neuro-psycholinguistics Studying variability in these disciplines can often mean focusing on the language processing mechanisms. For example, researchers can observe differences in language performances in one subject (inter-task variability) or differences in cerebral activation in several subjects for the same task (variability in the cerebral substrate involved). The speakers' linguistic profiles can also be relevant data to take into account in order to explain differences in language performance between healthy speakers and speakers suffering from a pathological condition.
Language pedagogy Contextualising the didactic situation at the sociolinguistic, cultural, social, economic and political levels allows for a general adaptation to that specific situation and leads to a potential multiplicity of “didactic landscapes”. Besides, as far as language pedagogy for the teaching of the French language is concerned, a major issue remains the linguistic norm that should be taught and how to define it.
Natural language processing Taking variability into account in natural language processing and computational linguistics means using different techniques and resources that can be applied on distinct levels of processing. Such applications as information retrieval or automatic summarization have to deal with variation, whether it is found at the morphological, syntactic or semantic level, and therefore bring about the use of strategies known as categorisation or ontology engineering, among others.
Semiotics, textual semantics, discourse analysis These disciplines constantly have to deal with the notion of variability, which is linked to different levels of textual analysis. At the most comprehensive level, contextualising any communication act (conditions of production, discursive construction, conditions of interpretation) is of paramount importance in order to formulate and improve an analysis. At a lower level now, research inspired by Bakhtin's works has shown to what extent the circulation of discourses can load a multitude of meanings and voices onto any textual fragment. Finally, variation can also be observed at a microsemantic level: tropes, diachronic impact or the influence of genres compel the researcher to question the stability of lexical meaning according to the incidence of context.
Sociolinguistics Concepts such as linguistic boundaries, linguistic networks or communities as well as isoglosses show that variation and variability are central notions in sociolinguistics and often research topics for sociolinguists, as far as general usage is concerned (whether it is discursive, lexical, grammatical) or pronunciation (phonetic realizations). Both notions of variation and variability can also question some theoretical models or some methodological protocols, for instance William Labov's work, as far as the study of the English language is concerned, or even as far as corpus linguistics in general is concerned.

Obviously, this list does not include all the research possibilities following from the theme of the conference, which is why every submission that will address the notions of variation and variability in the Language Sciences will be read and reviewed.

JéTou 2013 offers a challenging theme that every field of the Language Sciences can make their own. This conference will give the opportunity, to those who wish to come, to ask questions, discuss and compare their work, their methods, their reflexions in an interdisciplinary context, which favours positive exchanges and constructive debates.