This award will assist in support of a conference that will bring together experts in the fields of Linguistics, Social and Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Foreign Languages to discuss the latest developments in research on social and emotive factors affecting language production and comprehension and new empirical methodologies to study them. Six leading scholars in linguistic pragmatics and im/politeness research, three from North America and three from overseas, will deliver plenary lectures over the 2-½ day conference. In addition, approximately 70 papers and posters will be presented in three parallel sessions. The conference 'Experimental and Empirical Approaches to Politeness and Impoliteness' is an international and interdisciplinary conference that will take place at the University of Illinois Urbana campus from August 29-31, 2012 and will focus on experimental and data-intensive analyses of the effect of speaker attitude on grammatical expression. A central goal of the conference is to identify new areas of empirical engagement with the topic including online and offline experimental measures, and to help forge new international collaborations in these areas.
A broader aim is to help reinvigorate the links forged in the 1970s between linguistic theory and research on expressions of attitude and social relations that lie at the intellectual roots of the discipline. Additionally, the conference will help align theoretical advances in the field of linguistic im/politeness with applications in industry, education, and policy-making. The conference will provide an important venue for students and junior researchers to learn about on-going work in Linguistics and related fields that impacts the study of civility and to develop professional relationships. A selection of papers identified through peer review will be published in a volume edited by members of the organizing committee. This volume will extend awareness of the latest research in this interdisciplinary area to a broader scholarly community, and will contribute to our understanding of cross-cultural differences in the grammatical expression of speaker attitude and affinity.
Issues of interpersonal impression management and misunderstanding are becoming increasingly prominent in today's world. This is due both to increased mobility and the breakdown of traditional (offline) social networks, as well as to our enhanced technological ability to study these phenomena, both inside and outside of the lab. This award provided conference and post-conference support for ‘Empirical and Experimental Approaches to Politeness and Impoliteness’, an international conference hosted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from August 29 to 31, 2012. The conference brought together linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists investigating how human relationships are managed through language and more specifically how threat to face is linguistically expressed and cognitively processed. The benefits from promoting expert dialog in these areas are potentially numerous and extend beyond the academic communities directly involved. Manuals of interpersonal management are becoming part of standard training in a number of professions, from airtraffic controllers to healthcare practitioners. To the extent that we can succesfully capture the underlying mechanisms that regulate linguistic expression of speaker's attitude in our theoretical models, we will be better equipped to communicate that knowledge and how to apply it to anyone who can potentially benefit from it. Scholars from 14 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey), as well as the US, travelled to Urbana for the conference, which was attended by an estimated 130 faculty and students. Funds were used for travel subventions for four students selected on the basis of abstract quality, for participant support for six plenary speakers, and for preparation of a peer-reviewed volume of selected papers from the conference. The volume, entitled "Interdisciplinary perspectives on im/politeness," is under contract with John Benjamins Publishing Company in their AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS). It will contain 9 contributions organized in three parts (Self-reporting studies, Observational studies, and Experimental studies) that showcase the full range of methodologies currently employed in im/politeness research. In addition to the volume of selected papers, conference materials are publicly available online through the conference website (www.liar3.illinois.edu/), including the conference program, plenary speaker bios and abstracts of talks, as well as videos of the six plenary talks. The conference also provided some clear indications for future research. Among them, the importance of moving beyond models based on native speaker concepts of politeness and rudeness and of finding new ways to theorize facethreat in multilingual/cultural societies, the impact of new media on issues of politeness and impoliteness and how these are negotiated, and the new possibilities of scentific investigation of these issues involving technologies such as fMRI, ERPs and online experimental research in general. Moreover, multimodal representation of research data emerged as a new standard for the discussion of results. Special sessions on Spanish, Russian, and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages promoted interaction between researchers working on those languages and helped reach more specialized results.
