05/09/2025
The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) Annual Conference returns in 2025 with an exciting programme featuring distinguished keynote speakers, themed sessions, research presentations, and networking opportunities.
This year’s conference will delve into cutting-edge linguistic research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Miriam Butt (Universitӓt Konstanz)
Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam)
Nina Radkevich
Details TBC.
Panel Members: Rebecca Mitchell, Adam Schembri, Eva Eppler
In this themed LAGB session, we will focus on three aspects of linguistics and education.
Our invited speaker, Rebecca Mitchell, is a lecturer affiliated to the departments of French and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, an interpreter/translator, and a modern languages teacher in secondary school. In 2024, she proposed the idea of a ‘National Linguistics Day’ on 26th November each year (the birthday of Ferdinand de Saussuare) in order to get the general public ‘thinking, talking, and learning about the science of language’.
Adam Schembri, professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, will talk about ‘Linguistic issues in the British Sign Language GCSE curriculum’. In a public consultation in 2023, the UK Department for Education, sought feedback on the proposal subject content for the GCSE BSL curriculum for England. In his feedback, Adam identified a number of issues around key concepts and terminology in sign language linguistics, and also raised concerns about the curriculum proposing a focus on ‘standard BSL’ (no recognised ‘standard’ form exists, but there is widespread use of a variety heavily influenced by southern English sign varieties on television and in social media).
Eva Duran Eppler, Honorary Reader at the University of Roehampton, will provide a digest of language-related responses to the 2024 DfE Curriculum and Assessment Review (compiled on the CLiE website). The digest will include identified commonalities, points of divergence and areas where more evidence would be useful and thus suggest how the education sector can respond to requests for further clarification/evidence from the DfE.
LAGB 2025 will feature three themed sessions, details of which are provided below. When you submit your abstract, please indicate underneath your title whether you are submitting it for consideration to one of these sessions
Communicative motor movements (e.g., of the hands, face, body, etc.) that co-occur with language, or gestures, have been studied for decades in the contexts of, for example, why we gesture (McNeil, 1992; Kendon, 2004), with which psycholinguistic processes perceiving or producing gesture helps (Holler et al., 2018; Rasenberg et al., 2022), and how individuals with aphasia gesture (Rose, 2013; Clough & Duff, 2020). There have been general calls for gesture and spoken/signed language to be considered part of the same system (Abner et al., 2016; Hagoort & Özyürek, 2024), and cognitive linguists have begun to increase their incorporation of gesture into research (Cienki, 2022). However, the study of the systematic linguistic properties of gesture remains nascent. The integration of formal semantic and pragmatic analyses to gesture has begun in the last decade, such as in the characterisation of specifically representational gestures (Ebert & Ebert, 2014), the inferential typology that gestures bring (Schlenker, 2019), the formal semantics of gestures that whose timings not cooccur with speech (Schlenker, 2020), and even the formal semantics of specific manual expressions (Francis et al., 2023).
If spoken/signed language and gesture do originate from the same system or source, then many formal semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, and even phonological properties of the former may pertain to the latter. In this special session for LAGB 2025, we propose to facilitate a discussion at the frontiers of formal linguistic analysis: gesture (broadly construed). Submissions should treat gestural explananda with (formal) linguistic analysis in such a manner as to elucidate the systemic properties of gesture as a constituent of the human propensity for communication/faculty for language, be it realised through speech or sign. We encourage abstracts that include reference to empirical data from proprietary or online data (e.g., Reece et al., 2023) of gesture productions, either as predominantly theoretical or experimental work.
Please contact Tom Williamson T.Williamson@uwe.ac.uk for any additional information and questions.
The development of the field of Literary Linguistics has prompted a number of fascinating directions for study. Though often used hand-in-hand with the term ‘stylistics’, literary linguistics may also encompass the analyses of discourse structures pertaining to non-literary texts, such as political, advertising, and legal discourses. As a result, we may also consider the effects of language structures in our perception of discourse, such as the use of persuasive language across wider news media, the emotional interpretation and response of certain language forms, as well as more psycholinguistic interpretations of narrative processing and memory. In addition, literary linguistic analyses may orientate towards sociolinguistic interests of dialect representation and the encoding of social structures, or the tracking of language use over time by means of techniques associated with corpus linguistics.
In celebration of the cross-disciplinary nature and diversity of this field, we would like to invite scholars working within the field of literary linguistics field to submit abstracts for themed sessions throughout LAGB 2025. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
Please contact Jenny Amos (Jennifer.amos@uos.ac.uk) if you have any questions.
Details TBA
The deadline for submissions is 5PM GMT on 14 April 2025 (extended to the 22nd of April).
The Linguistics Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s (LAGB) Annual Conference welcomes abstract submissions from all subfields of linguistics to capture the diversity of linguistics research in the UK and beyond. LAGB 2025 will not only feature our usual general sessions that will run throughout the conference, but will also include three themed sessions. Abstracts can be submitted to be included in the general sessions, or as part of a themed session (see details below). Both members and non-members are invited to offer papers for the meeting. All abstracts will be blind-peer-reviewed by an international committee of reviewers.
LAGB 2025 will feature the return of Special Interest Panels. These SIPs will contain either 4 or 8 presentations relating to a particular theme or area of language-based interest, and may come from any sub-discipline of linguistics. Panel organisers are invited to submit a description/ rationale for the panel, as well as an indicative list of contributors.
Panel packages must contain the following and submitted as a single file:
If you have any questions, please contact Jenny and Adam (Jennifer.amos@uos.ac.uk and a.schembri@bham.ac.uk )
To ensure that we are able to consider your abstract, please ensure that it adheres to the following guidelines: