From the 8th to the 9th of December 2017, an innovative workshop entitled “Body Part Terms in Linguistic Usage: A Comparative and Typological Perspective” will be held in Warsaw, Poland. Invited speakers include the following: Zygmunt Frajzyngier (University of Colorado, USA); Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (University of Lodz, Poland); Helma Pasch (University of Cologne, Germany); and Ning Yu (Pennsylvania State University, USA). Abstracts are currently being accepted for 30 minute presentations. The deadline for abstracts is July 30, 2017. Each paper will be given 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for discussion.

The conference organizers invite papers which focus on one specific language or comparative/typological studies. Possible topics to be covered include:

• coding and categorization of body parts
• polysemy and semantic change of body part terms
• conceptualization processes (metaphor, metonymy) via body parts
• expressing emotional concepts through their “embodiment”
• grammaticalization processes
• usage patterns of constructed senses
• corpus studies of body part terms (e.g. frequency, collocations)
• compounding and noun incorporation
• “special” syntax (e.g. inalienable possession, use of pronouns)
• morphological derivation and semantic autonomy
• language-culture issues and idiomatic constructions

The University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic will be holding the Ostrava Onomastic Meeting from the 23rd to the 25th of April 2018. The theme of the conference is “Place Names as a Mirror of Political Developments in Modern European Society 1848 to 2018”. The conference will cover issues such as toponymy and state and national borders; toponymy and politics; toponymy and art; toponymy and ideology. The deadline for abstract submissions is November 20, 2017. Information on this conference can be found at the website.

The conference language is English. The authors are responsible for the content and language of their papers. Presentations of papers should not exceed 15 minutes; PowerPoint presentations are required. The conference organizers plan to publish a book containing papers that are accepted for the conference.

This is a call for participation in a colloquium session on Applied Onomastics at AAAL 2018, to be held in Chicago, IL, March 24-27, 2018. Names figure prominently in our identities and interactions as individuals, families, groups, organizations, and societies. Factors as varied as geography, culture, socioeconomic status, legal constraints, and marketing strategies influence names and naming. The study of names (onomastics), including personal, place, and commercial names, among others, is both multi- and interdisciplinary. Because of the ubiquity and important functions of names, they are also of “enduring interest to the wider public” (Hough 2016), confirmed by the long tradition of collaboration between academics and non-academics in name studies. The aim of this colloquium is to demonstrate how onomastics can offer practical solutions and insights to issues encountered in a wide range of contexts. Proposals are invited on any topic relating to Applied Onomastics, including but not limited to:

names and education
names and media
names and lexicography / name dictionaries
onomastic aspects of marketing and tourism
onomastic aspects of language planning
name-related policies, regulations and laws
onomastics and forensic linguistics
onomastics and psychology or cognition
name-based data mining and technologies
names and bi/multilingualism
cross-cultural naming practices
societal trends in naming
the relationship between Applied Onomastics and Applied Linguistics
the aims of Applied Onomastics as a field

Please send proposals containing a title, key words, abstract (300 words), and brief summary (50 words) by July 10th, 2017 to Maryann Parada (mparada1 AT csub.edu). the Colloquium Organize. Notifications will be sent by July 20th, 2017.

The call for papers has been officially opened for one of the largest international conferences in Applied Linguistics to be held down under.  For the fifth year, this huge event is being sponsored by the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ), the University of Auckland, and the Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand (ALANZ). Scheduled for the 27th to the 29th of November 2017, the theme for this year’s conference is “Applied Linguistics in the New Millennium: Multiple Theories, Pathways, and Practices.”  The formal call for papers as well as directions for abstract submissions may be found here. Abstract submission closes Monday 01 May, 2017.

The University of Sheffield will be holding a conference on historical onomastics on the 5th of September 2017.  In preparation for this event, a formal call for papers has been issued. The specific thematic focus of the conference is the use of names as historical sources. Interested researchers are encouraged to send in 300 word abstract proposals for 20 minute scientific presentations to James Chetwood [namesandhistory AT gmail.com].  The deadline for receipt of abstracts is the 25th of June 2017.

Names are a feature of all societies in all periods of history. We name people, places, pets, personal objects, planets, planes and political movements – any number of other things. The study of names has often focussed on their linguistic properties or their etymological origins. But names, and the way in which they are used, offer a great opportunity to find out about the society, culture and historical period to which they belong. They also allow us a glimpse into the everyday lives of the people who bore, chose and used them.

This conference will focus on names as historical sources. It will give scholars the chance to reflect on current approaches to how we study names and their use as a means of discovering more about the past.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Personal names, nicknames and bynames
• Place-names
• Name changes and pseudonyms
• Animal names
• Names in literature, film and television
• Names of ‘things’, such as personal objects, houses and products
• Names of groups, such as clans, ethnic groups and associations

Proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes are invited for any topic related to names as historical sources from any period.

From the 8th to the 9th of June 2017 in Mannheim, Germany, a special conference devoted to grammatical terminology in German will be held at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.  Entitled “Ars Grammatica 2017”, this scientific gathering welcomes researchers from the branches of computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics, syntax, and lexicography.  The deadline for abstract submissions is the 15th of April 2017. More on this German language event can be found at the conference website.

Under the title “Grammatical terminology – content and methods”, paper should deal with the characteristics and properties of grammatical technical terms in the field, and the tension between content and methodological application:

• From a substantive point of view, it is important to conceive and use as exact definitions as possible of specialized terminology in order to be able to express linguistic phenomena and explanations precisely. This suggests, in particular, such scientific disciplines as challenges in which varying theories of theory, cognitive interests or subjective authors’ decisions lead to a non-uniform terminological inventory, which is even contradictory in individual cases.
• From a methodological point of view, it is necessary to develop sufficiently powerful and sustainable structures for the coding of domain-specific terminological systems. The spectrum ranges from methodically oriented specialized vocabularies, thesauri to knowledge networks and ontologies with appropriately modeled concepts and attributes.

An international comparative studies conference entitled “Language and Culture: Dirty, Repulsive, Unwanted” will be held from the 18th to the 19th of September in Poznan, Poland.  The conference is being conjointly sponsored by the Department of Comparative Culture Studies and the Institute of Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University.  The purpose of the conference is to provide researchers an opportunity to present and discuss recent insights into the nexus between language, literature, and culture studies with regards to forbidden language and the language of the forbidden, the unwanted in lexicography and other spheres of communication, as well as taboo language in general.  The deadline for submission of an abstract proposal (max. 400 words) is May 31, 2017. The call for papers (in English) is here. More on this event can be found at this website.