On the 6-8 October 2011, an international conference, “Cognition, Conduct & Communication”, took place in the University of Łódż, Poland. This was a conference in Pragmatics and a very solid and impressive event. My personal interest lay in getting to know the fundamental conception in pragmatics well enough and to test my own readiness in this field. I had also had an invitation to it from the Organising Committee and my expectations were well rewarded.

On the 21-23 September 2011, an international conference, “Who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ after 9/11 – Reflections on Language, Culture and Literature in Times of Ideological Clashes”, took place in the University of Szczecin, Poland. It may be described as a conference with humanistic pursuits, sociolinguistic and applied literary in character.

12^th International Pragmatics Conference took place on the 3-8 July 2011 in Manchester, U.K. Its special theme was Pragmatics and Its Interfaces.

This was a major conference comparable only to a World Congress of Applied Linguistics. With a little less than two thousand papers given at this Conference, it was impossible to attend all of them and it is impossible to generalise on them overall.
The plenary lectures were significant by their scope and focus of the topics. Hans Kamp, the speaker at the Opening Plenary, addressed the classical concepts of semantics and pragmatics going back to the works of Charles Morris in his lecture, Pragmatics after Semantics? Where do we draw the line and how do we draw it? He showed that the original division between these fields when pragmatics starts where semantics leaves off is not that simple nor really true. “The various ways in which syntactic form and context interact to yield utterance meanings” indicate that “some of the mechanisms … traditionally counted as part of Pragmatics are already needed at the semantic level”. The speaker reconsidered the relationship between semantics and pragmatics and proposed a classification of pragmatic phenomena depending on their interaction with “the semantic component of the theory”.

On intercultural communication and stereotypes, an international conference

On the 15th of April 2011, an international research and methodological conference took place at a higher school, Wszechnica Polska, in Warsaw, Poland.
The theme of the Conference was “Intercultural Communication: Stereotypes”. It was a moderate event and fifteen papers were presented at it. The conference had a theoretical background, described stereotypes synchronically and diachronically, discussed practical questions and considered methodological issues. The participants discussed national stereotypes in history and literature (Prof. Joanna Korzeniewska-Berczynska, Prof. Janina Makosza-Bogdan, Dr. Dorota Pazio-Wlazlowska, Prof. Tomasz G.Pszczolkowski; Prof. Mikolaj Timoszuk, Prof. Tadeusz Szyszko, Dr. Gizela Grabinska, Dr. Marta Pilat-Zazunkiewicz),    stereotypes in communication and education (Dr. Grazyna Mankowska; P. Andriej A.Potiomkin, Prof. M.Liudvika Drazdauskiene, Dr. Dorota Piekarska-Winkler and mgr Agata Buchowiecks-Fudala, Dr. Nadzieja Kuptel, Dr. Joanna Lewinska).