12th 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).
The Poetry Weekend
Papers presented at conferences have been my regular current engagement. This has kept the voltage high, figuratively speaking, after a period of low emotional intensity which followed the termination of classroom teaching and research based on literature. After five presentations at local and international conferences in Lithuania in 2008, four papers given at international conferences in Milan, Szczecin, Warsaw and Brno in 2009, three presentations awaited me in 2010. The paper I gave at the 4th international conference of the Lithuanian Association of Language Teachers in May 2010 at the Kaunas University of Technology focused on social and cultural interests in foreign language teaching. The year was drawing to a close, but before I gave a paper on new words in English at the 4th international conference at the Pedagogical University of Vilnius on 18 November 2010, which was very well received, an exciting event was to double this accent at the end of the year. It was an international conference, The Contemporary Poetry Weekend, organized by the Literature, Media and Cultural Studies Special Interest Group (LMCS SIG) of the IATEFL and hosted by the British Council, Spring Gardens, London. The Poetry Weekend took place on 6-7 November 2010. It was a chamber event in a kingdom, which “had a very pleasant atmosphere about it”, as the Organiser of the Conference later put it.
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