Structure, Use and Meaning (SUM)
The 5th edition of the conference on linguistics – Structure, Use and Meaning (SUM) – takes place between 13-14 September 2018.
The event aims firstly to bring together researchers and practitioners in a meaningful dialogue, in order to synthesise different strands of existing academic research and to enable the mapping out of new research directions on institutional communication, that reflect the needs and requirements of the labour market, and secondly to provide advice and training/ teaching material that reflects actual practices.
Institutional talk requires a special type of interdisciplinary competence, pertaining to the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, pragmatics, and intercultural communication. Developing an intercultural competence is useful for raising awareness upon cultural differences and ideologies which shape communicative identities of individuals and groups in multinational institutions. Developing a sociolinguistic competence allows for manifestations of status, power, gender, education and so on. Pragmatically, such competence brings together the strategic means of achieving effectiveness and appropriateness in the communication continuum developing in various institutional settings.
The organisers invite researchers and practitioners interested in institutional communication to contribute with their expertise to create the premises for fairer, more rewarding and better work environments. In a challenging European context characterized by the migration of the work force, countries are both providers and hosts for various categories of people (students, unqualified workers, and highly-qualified personnel). All these categories need language skills, communication and interpersonal skills, intercultural knowledge, known as soft skills, in order to integrate to their various workplaces. Given the importance of these skills nowadays and the relative disregard for their wider acknowledgement and training, scholars, professionals and research students are invited to share their research and experience.