|
An impression of the 9th International
Pragmatics Association (IPrA) conference, 10-15 July 2005, Riva del Garda,
Italy
By Charles
Forceville
Media Studies
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Organizing an IPrA (www.ipra.be) conference has become an operation of
military proportions. The founding father of IPrA, Jef Verschueren, told
those present that some 1000 people had registered, while some 600+ papers
and posters had found their way into the programme. The plenary lecture
slots excepted, at each moment 12 parallel sessions were in full swing.
Nostalgically, he reminisced about IPrA 1, in Viareggio (Italy1985), when
the parallel sessions took place in opposite corners of the same room ….
Verschueren and executive secretary Ann Verhaert, the
latter Verschueren's wife and IPrA's mama, organized the conference in
collaboration with a number of local organizers, chaired by Marina Sbisŕ
(Univ. of Trieste). The location was the Palacongressi centre in
picture-postcard Riva del Garda, a hundred yards from the lake.
Paper presentations were either of a standalone kind
(although attempts had been made to group those on related topics
together), or part of multi-paper panel sessions proposed by IPrA members.
Prospective participants could submit their proposal for either format or
fo a poster, a procedure that was conducted entirely online. After a
massive reviewing process submitters were informed whether their proposal
was accepted for a paper or poster presentation, or rejected. A brief
motivation for the judgment could, in the case of multi-paper sessions, be
obtained via the panel organizer. An advantage of the online submission
procedure is that it allowed both for pre-conference awareness of the work
by fellow-panellists (since the system linked their proposals), and for
pre-conference fine-tuning of the abstract by the author.
The conference addressed a broad spectrum of topics.
Second Language Learning, Conversation Analysis, Computer-Mediated
Communication, Negation, Argumentation and Truth, Multimodal
Representations, Institutional Discourse, Culture/Language/Interaction,
Discursive Identity Construction, Narrative, Lying and Joking, Metaphor,
Intercultural Communication, Speech Acts, Citizenship as a Communicative
Achievement … these were only some of the areas covered. At the same time,
there is a narrowness in the conference topics in that, possibly for no
other reason than that it was linguists who first started "doing
pragmatics," the term is almost exclusively reserved for application to
verbal discourse. But if pragmatics is considered the discipline that
studies the relations between representations (rather than mere "verbal
texts") and users - as it should be - such a limitation is arbitrary.
While IPrA conferences hardly have should grow even bigger, there is
something odd about this restriction to the verbal.
As the co-organizer (with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi) of
the panel "The Pragmatics of Multimodal Representations" I can rightly be
accused of being somewhat biased. Nonetheless, even though the
multimodality panels (there were others) tended to be scheduled in too
small rooms, the organizers should be applauded for accommodating them in
the first place. To me, there is no doubt where the future is:
multimodality will be a buzz word for the next decade or so in humanities
studies, and I predict that research projects investigating interactions
between language, pictures, gestures, gazes, sounds, music in
representations, studied in their institutional context, will increasingly
take the floor of what were once traditional linguistics
conferences.
The organization and logistics were impressively
managed, the only problem perhaps being that only two laptops were
available for webmail checks, causing long queues. But both the logistics
and the quality of the lunches and coffee-with-sweets catering was
admirable. What else is there to say? During the IPrA members' meeting,
the delegate from Sweden was allowed to show the Göteborg tourist office
promotion DVD (the running theme: "Göteborg, we love you") to incite us
all to go there for IPrA 10, while a delegate from down under sang the
praise of Melbourne, the location of the 2009 conference. New contacts
were forged, old contacts renewed, book proposals were conceived, and we
managed to blend the useful with the pleasant by spending the evenings
eating and drinking on Riva's outdoor terraces.
ChF, Amsterdam 22 July 2005
|
