Concept Note
Humberto Maturana in “Biology of Language: The Epistemology of Reality” raised crucial questions pertaining to the process that must take place within an organism to establish a linguistic domain with another and the linguistic interaction that permits an organism (us) to describe and to predict events that it may experience. These questions transcend the notion of language outside the precincts of linguistic verbiages towards a multi-contextual, multidisciplinary and cognitive platform of ‘languaging’ in which language becomes a “process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience” (Swan 96). According to the 2011 census, there are only 22 scheduled languages spoken by nearly 96.71 percent of the Indian population but there are more than 19500 existing languages or dialects that are spoken by the remaining population. Given, the kind of role language plays in its social discourse, it may be inferred that they are not only a tool for communication but help a great deal in social integration, historical documentation, development and so on and so forth. It may not be exaggeration to also infer that language makes literature and in turn literature also becomes the savior of the language in which it is written, expanding its horizon and not just being a tool of thought-transference. In such a context, it becomes imperative to investigate the methodologies in which one realizes that languaging has always been seminal towards validating and authenticating various forms of epistemological and ontological existence, within and beyond words.
2019, has already been declared the ‘International Year of Indigenous Languages’ that stridently echoes the 2008 sentiment “languages matter” and plays a pivotal role in ‘sustainable development, peace-building and reconciliation’(2019). It insisted that retaining the diversity of language was of extreme importance for it adds to the vantage point of multilingualism, a key feature of Indian mental, emotional and intellectual make-up. Till date, research on languages has been underpinned with multifarious approaches by scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. Scholars from linguistics, literature, translation and computational linguistics have adopted different independent methodologies and incompatible styles but in current scenario there is an imperative need to look into the possibilities of a collaborative framework that sustains the language, especially the indigenous ones. 2019 has already set the tone towards this mélange and an extension of the same vision and mission with an enthusiastic fervor from academia will benefit society at large and languages in particular. Keeping these arguments at the backdrop, this conference takes up the Fanonian challenge of turning a new leaf by bringing together various groups whose objectives are similar in generating new concepts which will reinvent the existing process of languaging and translating and explore its de-hierarchized dimension.
In this conference the participants are invited to contribute in the following areas:
Languaging and translation
Language and literature
Language acquisition and learning
Interpreting language: beyond linguistic associations
Language as/and power
Indigenous languages and folk literature
Language and capitalism
Academic and non-academic languages
Social, cultural, and political contexts of language teacher education
Coloniality and social justice in revitalization of language
Language as a decolonial pedagogy
Intercultural education
Language and existence
Digitalization and language preservation
‘Endangered’ and/or ‘less implemented’ / ‘less spoken’ / ‘only spoken and not written’
Machine translation
NLP applications
Phonology, Morphology and word segmentation
Semantics: lexical, sentence level, textual inference and other areas of semantics
Sentiment analysis, Stylistic analysis, and Argument mining
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
Innovation in language teaching and learnings
Language teaching methodology
Corpus Linguistics
Forensic Linguistics
Historical Linguistics
Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics
Orthography, Pragmatics, Rhetoric and Stylistics
Language in every day use, social media and virtual communications
Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
Politeness and Discourse Analysis
In addition to the above mentioned broad areas, we also solicit papers suitable to the theme of the conference. Selected presenters will be invited to contribute to an edited volume to be brought out by a reputed publisher. The edited book in four volumes will broadly comprise chapters from Literature, Linguistics, Translation and Computational Linguistics. Along with the conveners, Dr. Asif Ekbal will be co-editing the volume. Further details will be provided after the conference.
Submissions
We invite abstract submission from scholars of all backgrounds for regular presentation. Individual abstracts of about 200-250 words on the above mentioned themes must be submitted on/by 30 November 2019 to hssconferenceiitpatna@gmail.com. The selected presenters will be notified by 20 December 2019. The selected participants are required to register by 10 January 2020 and submit their full paper by 31 January 2020. All the documents need to be prepared according to the MLA 7th Edition format. To encourage student’s participation, there will be a student “works-in-progress”/poster session. Questions and requests for more information should be directed to Dr. Priyanka Tripathi (priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in)
Contact Us For more detailsDr. Priyanka Tripathi
Room No 513, Block 6
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
Bihta- 801 103 (Bihar), INDIA
Phone: +91 612 3028182 (Office)
Email: hssconferenceiitpatna@gmail.com
