Program

WHEN: 18th November 2016 (1 day event)

Organization of the symposium

Eight world-class scholars have been invited to Amsterdam to discuss the nature, structure, processing, and modeling of abstract concepts in various disciplines. Each scholar is editing a draft to exemplify theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of their perspective on the symposium topic. The drafts are due by the end of September and will be then circulated among symposium peers. Comments and questions will be prepared by the keynotes for their peers.

During the symposium, then, each keynote will present their position in a 20 minutes presentation, and will receive specific comments  prepared in advance two peers, to boost the academic debate. After each session 10 minutes will be dedicated to questions from the audience.

A detailed program with timetable will be provided soon.

The provisional titles of the keynotes’ short lectures are the following:

Prof. Friedemann Pulvermueller – Concrete mechanisms for abstract meaning

Prof. Gun Semin – The place of metaphors in the order of things

Prof. Piek Vossen – Granularity and identity of event descriptions

Dr. Diane Pecher – Curb your embodiment

Prof. Max Louwerse – Language statistics explain conceptual processing

Prof. Alessandro Lenci – The Emotions of Abstracts: A Distributional Semantic Analysis

Prof. Ken McRae – Situations, perceptual information and abstract concepts

Prof. Gabriella Vigliocco – Learning and processing abstract concepts: the role of language and the role of emotion

A preliminary program is sketched here: preliminary-program