Call for Papers

The Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim is pleased to announce the 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10). The conference will take place in Mannheim, Germany, from 18 to 21 July 2023. The aim of the ICLC conference series, running since 1998, is to encourage fine-grained cross-linguistic research comprising two or more languages from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. ICLC brings together researchers from different linguistic subfields (and neighboring disciplines) to continue the (interdisciplinary) dialog on comparing languages, to foster the development of an international community, to discuss the state of the art, and to advance possible new areas of cross-linguistic research. Contrastive Linguistics as a linguistic subfield has had a checkered history, but comparative and contrastive work has always been and continues to be an important part of linguistic research. New impulses for comparative and contrastive work include the increasing availability of multilingual corpora or comparative work drawing on naturalistic interaction data. At this anniversary edition of ICLC, we want to provide a stage for the presentation of such new work, and reflect the past, current and future developments of contrastive research in linguistics.

We invite contributions addressing (meta)theoretical, methodological or empirical issues, such as (but not limited to) the following:

• Comparison of phenomena in two or more languages addressing topics from any area and level of linguistic analysis, including lexicon, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics as well as matters such as register and socio-cultural context
• The state of the art and recent advances in contrastive linguistic research
• The aims, objectives and scope of contrastive linguistic research
• The status of contrastive research within linguistic studies and its relationship with neighbouring or complementary approaches such as historical, typological, micro-variationist, intercultural and contact linguistics
• The link between contrastive studies and fields of applied linguistics such as foreign language teaching and learning, translation studies and corpus linguistics
• Potentials and limits of theoretical frameworks in relation to contrastive analysis (e.g., functional, cognitive, interactional, generative, constructional approaches)
• Theoretical and theoretical-methodological issues (comparability, incommensurability, the socio-cultural context, tertia comparationis, language universals)
• Empirical and data-related methodological issues (parallel / translation corpora, comparable corpora, learner corpora, multimodal corpora, naturalistic data of face-to-face interaction, psycho- and neurolinguistic experiments, surveys)
• The significance of the contrastive perspective for language-specific description on the one hand and for cross-linguistic generalizations and the development of linguistic theory on the other hand

Some of these issues will be addressed by five invited keynote speakers.

The conference will include a poster session. The conference language will be English.

Following the conference, all participants will have the opportunity to submit their contributions for a peer-reviewed publication. We plan to offer different publication options and will make an additional call after the conference.