International Academic Interdisciplinary Conference From Language to Mind 3: On the Occasion of the 70th Birthday of Academician Arvo Krikmann

10-11 September 2009, Tartu, Estonia

Programme      Abstracts

Organized by the Department of Folkloristics at the Estonian Literary Museum and the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

Dear colleague,

On July 21, 2009 one of the most renowned, versatile and productive folklorists in Estonia, academician Arvo Krikmann, senior researcher at the Estonian Literary Museum, will be celebrating his 70th birthday. On this occasion the international interdisciplinary conference From Language to Mind 3 will be organized on September 10-11, 2009 by the Estonian Literary Museum and the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Throughout his career, Arvo Krikmann has above all been interested in the origin, historiography and textology of Estonian and Baltic-Finnic short forms of folklore. This has included research on the sources of Estonian phraseology and folk rhetoric; the structural levels and interrelations of the short forms of folklore; syntax, logic, modalities and semantics of figurative speech; classification in paremiology; theoretical approaches to the study of metaphor and other figures of speech; geographical distribution of folklore and dialects; applications of quantitative methodology in folkloristics and dialectology.

We invite you to attend our conference and request you to enhance its success in sharing with us your research results.

Papers presenting new and original research on the following topics are sought:

1. Minor genres of folklore (proverbs, phraseological expressions, riddles)
   We seek papers discussing phraseological expressions, especially the issues related to the geographical spread of proverbs, the relations of archive material and the actual use of proverb material, the ideological nature of proverbs, and antiproverbs. In terms of phraseology, papers are sought on the following topics: the culture-specific aspect in phraseological expressions, cliches and variability in phraseology, the presentation of set expressions in databases, and the use of phraseological expressions in contemporary media. The focus of this topic is traditional riddles and more recent riddle subcategories (conundrums or joking questions; droodles; compound puns; word games; riddle narratives, etc.). Archival text corpora provide good representation of material collected throughout different periods, allowing for observation and description of diachronic changes in the genre in the socio-cultural context, reflecting the general cultural dynamics of the studied phenomena.
   
   
2. Theories of figurative speech
   The central themes in this category are the analysis of proverbs and expressions from the cognitivist aspect, especially the relationship of proverb metaphors, phraseologisms and metaphors. This category also covers treatments of the understanding of units of figurative speech, including the relationship of direct and figurative speech, and the application of the theory of conceptual blending and integration in the study of figurative speech.
   
   
3. Folk humour and humour theories
   Accepted topics range from the close analyses of jokes (including old folk joke tales as well as contemporary jokelore) to the more theoretical insights into the study of humour. This wide focus will cover some less-researched areas of humour research, for example targets of mockery and its interaction with the ethnic/political dimension of jokes in different socio-political context, the influence of the Internet on jokelore and particularly the oral joke-telling tradition, the relationship and overlapping of humour and figurative speech, and manifestations of concurrent trends of globalization and subculturalization in post-socialist jokes.

The conference takes place in two languages: English and Russian.

Registration deadline: June 15, 2009.

The organizing committee will allocate the submitted proposals in sections according to the section topics.

Authors will be sent a notification of acceptance (or rejection) of the proposal abstract by June 17, 2009.

Registration fee 50 Euros which will cover the publication of the paper in the conference volume will be paid at the conference.

The papers submitted (maximum length of 40,000 characters) will be published among the conference proceedings. Submissions should be sent to folklore@folklore.ee by December 1, 2009. The acceptance of the article for publication will be decided by the editorial board and the authors will be notified of the final list of articles by February 28, 2010 Authors will receive author guidelines and style instructions.

Conference website http://www.folklore.ee/rl/fo/konve/2009/kriq70

SPONSORS:

Conference is supported by the target financed project SF0030181s08 "Narrative aspects of folklore. Power, personality and globalization".