Call for submissions: Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS)
The 2nd Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS) will be held in Saarbruecken, Germany, 13-15 February 2025. The central theme of this conference is rational communication, i.e. the idea that language users continuously strive to optimize their means of communication to effectively convey their intended messages. RAILS brings together research on (1) how interlocutors process and update information in diverse situational contexts, (2) how language use is adapted to certain contexts and intended referents, and (3) how linguistic and conceptual information is stored and maintained in short- and long-term memory.
We invite submissions from researchers across the language sciences – including speech science, theoretical linguistics, empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics and neuroscience, computational linguistics, as well as language development, change and evolution – who apply rational probabilistic explanations to linguistic phenomena, or bring novel experimental findings to bear on such accounts.
Keynote speakers:
Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University)
Richard Futrell (University of California, Irvine)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
Rachel Ryskin (University of California, Merced)
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts should be submitted as a single PDF file via https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/43090/submissions/new, adhering to the guidelines listed on our conference website.
We accept submissions for posters and/or talks. Talks are slated for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions.
Submission of planned work is invited for poster presentation only. Note that, if accepted, we expect results to be presented at the conference.
Important dates:
Submissions open: 8 July, 2024
Submissions due: 16 September, 2024
Notification of acceptance: 4 November, 2024
Registration period: 11 November-16 December, 2024
De-anonymized abstracts due in final form: 2 December, 2024
Conference: 13-15 February, 2025
Scientific Committee:
Regine Bader
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb
Katja Haeuser
Robin Lemke
Ivan Yuen
Scientific and financial support for this conference comes from the Collaborative Research Center SFB1102 Information Density and Linguistic Encoding.
For inquiries, please send an email to rails2025@lst.uni-saarland.de.