THEME OF THE CONFERENCE
Referring to entities is a fundamental aspect of languages since it allows to refer to things and people in the world. Speakers can opt for different referential expressions (e.g. overt and null pronouns, noun phrases, proper names, etc.) to indicate a particular entity in discourse and listeners have to be able to select the correct referent according to the speaker’s intention. This is often known as anaphora resolution. The theme of the conference is to address the acquisition and the processing of reference and anaphora resolution. When acquiring, processing and resolving reference, several factors are involved, such as information status (topic/focus), the syntactic position of the antecedent, the accessibility of the referent, the number of potential or competing antecedents, the distance between the referential expression and its antecedent, etc. So, the aim of the conference is to gain insight into the different mechanisms that shape anaphora resolution across languages.
The international conference on “The Acquisition and Processing of Reference and Anaphora Resolution” (APRAR 2021) is a joint initiative of the Department of English and German Philology at the Universidad de Granada (Spain) and the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies (Centre for Linguistics (CLIN)) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). The theme of the conference ties in with the research topic of the ANACOR research project (ANACOR: A corpus-based approach to anaphora resolution in second language acquisition: beyond the interfaces; PI Cristóbal Lozano), an international research project based at the Universidad de Granada.
OBJECTIVES
The aim of this conference is to address the acquisition and/or the processing of reference and anaphora resolution. The following topics will be discussed:
– The multiple factors that constrain reference resolution / anaphora resolution (morphosyntactic, semantic, discursive and cognitive and neuropsychological factors).
– Its processing and acquisition in different populations (native speakers, L2 learners, bilinguals, children, heritage speakers, clinical populations, etc.).
– Both corpus and experimental approaches to anaphora resolution.
– The different mechanisms that shape anaphora resolution across typologically similar/different languages.
The goal of the conference is to deepen our understanding on the acquisition and processing of reference and to analyse different approaches to this topic.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
– Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh): L1 attrition and L2
acquisition: two sides of the same coin
– Jacopo Torregrossa (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): Bilingual reference use as a window into input effects in bilingual language acquisition
– Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge): Deviance in anaphora
resolution: the same symptom in different populations
CONFERENCE DATES
19th – 20th May 2021
VENUE
Online (Zoom)
REGISTRATION DEADLINE
10th May 2021
REGISTRATION FEE
Free for non-presenters