Hosted by the Collaborative Research Center 1252 “Prominence in Language”, the 4^th International Conference "Prominence in Language" will take place from April 23 to 24, 2026 at the hotel Leonardo Royal Köln - Am Stadtwald (Dürener Str. 287, 50935 Köln).

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, discourse pragmatics and multimodality both in spoken and in signed languages. It also links up with social cognition and narratology. Current research efforts are devoted to language in typical usage settings, such as written genres comprising larger discourse segments and everyday conversation, i.e. interactive communication. A recently added focus is individual and population-specific variability, which affects speaker perspective and dialogic communication in general.

The International Conference “Prominence in Language” has been running in Cologne since 2015, with the second and third issue having taken place in 2018, and 2022. The Fourth International Conference “Prominence in Language” ICPL IV will take place in April 2026. It 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, both in spoken and in signed languages.

We ask for the submission of abstracts on prominence-related phenomena by December 3, 2025, 23:59 anywhere on earth. An author may be (co-)author of several contributions, but every contribution must have a different presenting author. Anonymized two-page abstracts must be submitted with the format given in the template provided. 

Abstracts should be submitted via OpenReview at the following address:

OpenReview Link

Please note that new profiles on OpenReview created with an institutional email will be activated automatically. New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.

A (non-exhaustive) list of topics to be addressed at ICPL IV may include for instance 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)
3. factors determining the ranking of entities in discourse (e.g., agentivity, topicality, activation)
4. the role of prominence in the tense-aspect-modality 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)
7. prominence and multimodality
8. prominence and individual variation
9. prominence and clinical populations
10. prominence and gender/sex
11. psycho- and neurolinguistic underpinnings of prominence relations
12. dynamic modelling of prominence
13. language comparison and cross-linguistic perspectives
14. prominence in language acquisition, bilingualism and multilingualism
15. studying prominence using large language models

Important dates:

• December 3, 2025, AoE - Submission deadline (there will be NO deadline extension)
• January 23, 2026 - Notification of Acceptance
• April 23-24, 2026 - Conference in Cologne

Program

(TBA)

Invited speakers

(TBA)