Call for Papers
The workshop Social Meaning and Grammar kicks off the Social Grammar Lab at the University of Zurich—a research unit that explores new ways of conceptualizing and experimentally testing a theory of grammar that is built on the fundamental interaction between linguistic form and social information. The driving philosophy of the Lab is that only outside-of-the-box thinking across different subfields might enable significant progress in an interdisciplinary area such as Social Grammar—and might also ultimately lead to a change in how grammar is taught in schools and discussed and conceptualized in our societies more generally. Therefore, we invite contributions from a wide range of linguistic subfields, including but not limited to:
- Formal linguistics frameworks that analyze social meaning components.
- Sociolinguistic frameworks that focus on linguistic form.
- Experimental work on processing social meaning components, including questions regarding their acquisition, comprehension, and production.
- Philosophical work on conventionalization as connected to social meaning.
Submission guidelines:
We invite submissions of anonymous abstracts for 30-minute talks (20 presentation + 10 discussion). Submissions should not exceed two A4 pages (incl. references + examples), 12pt. single spaced, with 2.5cm (= one-inch) margins on all sides. Either PDF or Word format is accepted. Please upload your abstracts at:
by the deadline listed below.
Submission deadline: October 1, 2025
Notification: November 1, 2025
Workshop: February 10-11, 2026
Organizers: