After the huge #iclc16 conference, I am about to leave for the exact opposite type of event: instead of 14 parallel sessions, just 10 talks at #rtanjLinguistics4, with ample time for discussion. I am talking about "Modification and the nature of adjectives", and I am looking very much forward to everything about this event, including traveling there via Budapest and Belgrad with first train and then bus. https://sites.google.com/view/rtanj/home

If you want to read up on #ICLC16, take a look at @jn‘s megathread starting here https://fediscience.org/@jn/110847328788583288

Still overwhelmed by the amazing experience of #ICLC16 - excellent talks, great conversations, lots of fun. Happy that we @HHU had the opportunity to host such a great event!

The sixth day of #iclc16 begins! Looking forward to the plenary by… wait, where is everybody?!?

Huge props to @stefanhartmann and the whole organizing team of #iclc16 for making this a great conference!

Claudia Raihert presents work on metaphor/figurative language in discourse and other genres.
#iclc16
They chose the genres news and fiction and looked at landscape and weather metaphors. Source domains nouns were generated with WordNet, then queried with COCA which resulted in 27/81 keywords.

The theme session ok communicative efficiency by Anita Slonimska and Natalia Levshina was really cool! Lots of interestingbppints raised, and great to see multimodality research represented at #iclc16

Gertraud Fenk-Ocszlon discusses working memory constraints and their implications for efficient coding of MSG's #iclc16
The more predictable, the shorter and first in the sequence. To place high info amount early would lead to cognitive overload.
WM constraints the avg lvl of information being transmitted.
WM = set of processes holding mental representations temporarily available for use in thought & action (Cowan 2017)

Kaius Sinnemäki with Francesca Do Garbo, Eri Kashima & Mark Ellison on communicative efficiency and language contact
#iclc16
Not only discourse, but also grammar and lexicon are organized in an efficient way. But in this research multilingualism and L contact have been neglected (while multilinguism is the norm rather than a deviation).

Second talk is by Jiahhao Yang & Sotaro Kita on how hearing speakers create manual gestures to benefit comprehension.
#iclc16
The focus of this talk is on silent gesture. We use silent gesture when language is inhibited.
But how to we choose gestural symbols to represent a concept?
For example APPLE could be represented by various associations.so we should great variation.
But research has shown that across cultures people use often EAT AN APPLE rather than other options

Anita Slonimska with @ozyurek_a and Olga Capirci on communicative efficiency in sign languages.
Different modalities have different affordances, like simultaneity in the visual modality.
#iclc16
SLs have linear organization just like spoken language. But the visual affordance allows simultanous iconic depiction. Articulators can be organized in space so that they reflect the relationship in the event.

Alexandre François presents Dialexification, a tool for studying cross-ling patterns of semantic change.
#iclc16
Most studies of colexification are synchronic. To study sem change, like colex links appearing or disappearing one can study common paths via a typological database of lexical change (EvoSem) reconstructing meanings rather than forms using pairs of dialexified senses.
See tiny.cc/EvoSem_ICLC

Day 4 of #iclc16 starts with a plenary connecting phenomenology and cognitive linguistics. Jordan Zlatev on Merleau-Ponty and the intertwining of bodily experience and language.
Zlatev starts by introducing the relatively young discipline of cognitive semiotics and proposs it as a synthesis of cog sci, cog ling and semiotics informed by phenomenology.

The third day of #iclc16 ends, like every day in the life of a cognitive linguist, with the brushing of teeth as a metonymy for getting ready for bed.

Sterre Leufkens discusses redundancy, which has lots of advantages for languages, e.g. enhancing learning, processing and salience/robustness of messages. #iclc16
But redundancy also violates economy, transparency, and to some extent learnability, e.g. for L2 learners who favour transparency.
How do these competing motivations manifest when language is used?
Communicative efficiency means that we should not spend more effort than necessary to achieve something, so be redundant only if needed

Norbert Vanek (with Chromy, Podlipsky and Majid) asks: are words unique?
#iclc16
Verbal labels facilitate category formation ad hoc (Lupyan & Casasanto 2015), even pseudo words.
But is this due to sound-symbolism?
Miller et Al 2019 showed a similar study with tacticle discrimination.

Alan Cienki looks at simultaneous interpreting, where interpreters are usually invisible to the audience, but still gesturing.
#iclc16
Stance-taking and footing is a out certainty, what is in focus and attitudinal relations to what is talked about.
Speakers are laminated in that they represent different kinds of footing. Interpreters are good examples of laminated speakers.

Learnt something cool in Terry Janzen's talk: in ASL, which doesn't have tense marking, signers can 'gaze' into the past (away from the addressee)
#iclc16

Maybe I should borrow this and read it overnight so that I know what my talk with @ungerer_tobias
tomorrow will actually be about #ICLC16

Vini Macuch Silva with Alex Lorson and Bodo Winter on English change-of-state verbs used to talk about quantity.
#iclc16
Which constructions use verbs to signal change in quantive information?
We start with 2 verb seeds: increase and decrease, which were cross-referenced using synonyms from two dicts.
Most of these verbs also tend to be spatial, which means they are biased for goals as spatial language tends to be in Eng. Usually the target of the movement is encoded.