Hosted by the Collaborative Research Center 1252 Prominence in Language and the Cologne Center of Language Sciences (CCLS), the 3^rd International Conference "Prominence in Language" took place from June 2 to 3, 2022 at AMERON Hotel Regent, Cologne.

Program

Conference program

Booklet (including abstracts)

Invited speakers

• Amalia Arvaniti (Radboud University Nijmegen): The trouble with prominence
• Dale Barr (University of Glasgow): Perspective-taking and its impostors in language use
• Dejan Matić (University of Münster): Prominence and information structure

Organizing committee

Sophie Repp, Jakob Egetenmeyer, Haydar Batuhan Yildiz, Maria Lialiou

Call for papers

Prominence relations establish a ranking between linguistic units, such as prosodic units, arguments of a verb, and discourse referents. Prominence is one of the key notions in language and communication: it accounts, for instance, for prosodic highlighting and for the building of linguistic structure and discourse representations. The CRC 1252 Prominence in Language (University of Cologne) investigates the role of prominence from an interdisciplinary linguistic perspective, involving phonology and phonetics, morpho-syntax, semantics and discourse pragmatics. It also links up with social cognition and narratology. Recently, the perspective has been extended to cover also sign language and multimodality.

The Third International Conference “Prominence in Language”  (the first and second issues of the conference took place in Cologne in 2015 and 2018) aims at advancing the understanding of the notion of prominence in language and at promoting the exchange among researchers working on prominence-related phenomena from various perspectives and disciplines. We invite contributions employing quantitative and qualitative research methods, synchronic and diachronic perspectives, cross-linguistic research, modelling, psycho- and neurolinguistic and cognitively oriented approaches as well as applied ones.

A (non-exhaustive) list of topics to be addressed at the workshop may include the following

1. the encoding and decoding of prominence
2. language-specific and universal prominence scales and structures (e.g., animacy scale, referentiality scale, metrical scale, thematic role hierarchy, etc.) 
3. factors determining the ranking of entities in discourse (e.g., agentivity, topicality, activation, etc.) 
4. the role of prominence in the tense-aspect system
5. the relation between the prominence status of entities in discourse and their availability as perspective-takers
6. prominence of propositions (e.g., rhetorical relations, argumentative relations, etc.)
7. prominence and multimodality
8. prominence and variation
9. psycho- and neurolinguistic underpinnings of prominence relations 
10. dynamic modelling of prominence
11. language comparison and cross-linguistic perspectives
12. prominence in language acquisition, bilingualism and multilingualism