University of Helsinki

The CLARe 4 conference in Helsinki 2019 follows the conferences in University of Louvain in 2014 and 2015 and FU Berlin in 2017. The aim of the conference is to gather researchers together who are interested in the study of language and aging research. The conference aims to provide an arena for empirical approaches and innovative methods to gather language data from older adults. We want to stimulate contributions that help to better identify the position of language and aging research in the broader context of linguistics and sociolinguistics. Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially welcome.

With the themes “Interaction, Methods, and Positions”, we invite presentations from a range of subfields in the area of language and aging. The thematic session of interaction focuses on interaction involving older adults. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in situational settings involving persons with dementia, focusing on how these persons and their conversational partners collaborate to construct meaning in interaction. In the field of methods, we want to provide an arena for empirical approaches and innovative methods to gather language data from older adults. Because research on aging is still under-represented in the field of linguistics, there is a strong need for a discussion on various methodological points of departure. The session of positions is dedicated to papers that outline what can be learned from language and aging research in other disciplines such as, e.g. language change, and vice versa: paradigms and experiences that could shed new light on language related issues of aging.

Our keynote speakers are Christina Samuelsson (Linköping University), Sylvie Ratté (ETS Montréal), and Fred Gregersen (University of Copenhagen).

We invite proposals for oral presentations and posters. Abstracts should be anonymous and have maximum 500 words (not including references) and must specify how the paper contributes to the themes of the conference. The abstracts should include the main arguments of the paper, some details about the data and methods, and preliminary results or implications of the findings.

Proposals and abstracts should be sent by e-mail to contact@clare-corpora.org, before 30 June 2018. Please write “CLARe 4 abstract” as the subject of the email and please name the attachment as follows: “clare4_short title_paper/poster_rtf”. Make sure to include the following information in the mail: author’s name, affiliation, and postal address; title of the contribution; 3 to 5 keywords; type of presentation (oral paper, poster).

Abstracts will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

There will be a moderate conference fee of ca. 60 € which will cover coffee breaks and meals during the conference. Conference website: www.clare-corpora.org

Important dates

Submission deadline: 30 June 2018

Notification of acceptance via e-mail: 31 August 2018

Scientific committee

Heidi Hamilton (Georgetown U, Washington)
Annette Gerstenberg (U Potsdam)
Frans Gregersen (U Copenhagen)
Camilla Lindholm (U Helsinki)
Anne Mäntynen (U Helsinki)
Kaarina Mononen (U Helsinki)
Sylvie Ratté (ETS Montréal)
Christina Samuelsson (Linköping University)