POP CULTURAL LINGUISTICS
Researching and Theorizing Performed Language and Communication
Lecce (Italy) 25-26 February 2027
The study of mass-media-distributed pop-cultural artifacts - such as songs, films, television series, comics, video games, and so on - is becoming increasingly widespread in academia due to their enormous reach and the fact that they constitute a significant portion of contemporary everyday communication (with potentially significant social influence). In this regard, it should be noted that language, as a central creative component of pop-cultural communication, has received increased attention, and that the linguistic analysis of relevant uses has established itself as a branch of research known as Pop Cultural Linguistics, dedicated to the study of performed language and its specific conditions of production and reception in relevant contexts. Within this emerging paradigm, approaches that focus on the interaction of linguistic, social, and cultural factors play a particularly important role, among other things to highlight that pop-cultural artifacts are not simply commercial (entertainment) products but always also convey and construct social meaning. Another evident form of interaction in these artifacts occurs with other modalities (music, images, gestures, etc.) and the overall meaning-making potential these multimodal ensembles create.
To take account of the increasing relevance attributed to the study of performed language and to highlight how current research contributes to its analysis and theorization, the conference Pop Cultural Linguistics: Researching and Theorizing Performed Language invites contributions from all linguistic subdisciplines (comprising, for example, sociolinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, register studies, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, applied linguistics, etc.) using qualitative and quantitative as well as multi-method approaches (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, surveys, discourse analysis, etc.).
Convenors
