The College of Foreign Languages in Czestochowa, Department of English, Faculty of Linguistics, is pleased to announce the organisation of an international conference

                    Syntax in Cognitive Grammar
                       Czestochowa, Poland
                         April 9-11, 2010


Most older students of linguistics remember that cognitive grammar, as it emerged in the 1980s from the work of R. Langacker, G. Lakoff, L. Talmy, C. Fillmore and others, was at first concerned with such issues as the cognitive/conceptual foundations of linguistic categories and semantics, cognitive models and frames, prototype theory applied to linguistic categorization and metaphor. With the focus on meaning, relatively little attention was paid to the formal aspects of language, especially syntax. Increasingly more studies of traditional syntactic phenomena appeared in the nineties, particularly after the publication of R. Langacker's second volume of Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. Soon this new "cognitive syntax" took a slightly different turn and gained a new momentum after A. Goldberg published her Stanford dissertation and C. Fillmore, in cooperation with P. Kay, started to work out the principles and formalism of construction grammar. As a result, Langackerian cognitive grammar and various versions of construction grammar now offer sophisticated theories of grammatical structure, which make it possible to describe a growing number of traditional as well as new aspects of the formal structure of language, viewed as a symbolic unity of form and meaning. We hope that the conference will provide a suitable forum in which researchers of different cognitive and functional persuasions can present their ideas and proposals concerning syntactic theory within the broad cognitive paradigm as well as studies of particular grammatical problems within the cognitive and functional frameworks.

Languages of the conference: English and Polish

Conference website: www.syncog.wsl.edu.pl

Plenary lectures:
Miriam Fried - two plenary lectures on the principles of construction grammar Constructional Syntax
Jaako Leino – Cognitive syntax and spoken language
Bogusław Bierwiaczonek - Metonymy in syntax

The main areas of interest for the conference are:

Morphology viewed as a study of single word constructions
Idioms as constructions
Phrasal, sentential and other constructions in the world's languages
Long-distance dependencies in constructions
Functional and pragmatic components of constructions
Constructions in discourse
Constructional polysemy
Diachronic construction grammar
Acquisition of syntax
Grammaticalization in cognitive grammar
Contrastive construction grammar
Cognitive grammar vs. construction grammar vs. functional grammar vs. conceptual grammar
Metonymy, metaphor and conceptual blending in syntax 

We look forward to seeing you in Czestochowa

Conference Organisers