University of Bucharest
CNCSIS – UEFISCDI
Faculty of Letters
Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Edgar Quinet 5-7, 010017, Bucharest, Romania
Tel./fax: +40 213146177

International conference

Parliamentary Discourses across Cultures: Interdisciplinary Approaches

September 23-24, 2011, Bucharest, Romania

You are cordially invited to participate in the international conference on European Parliamentary Discourses, organized by the Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters), in connection with the Research Project Tradition and Modernity in the Romanian Parliamentary Discourse: a Pragma-Rhetorical Approach, sponsored by the CNCSIS – UEFISCSU (code 2136/ 2008, PN II IDEI).

The conference has an interdisciplinary scope and is open to specialists in several fields, such as Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, History, Political Sciences, Sociology, Media and Communication.

The topic is motivated by the growing interest for research on political discourse and particularly parliamentary discourse, one of its major subgenres. The distinctive features of parliamentary practices are of central interest to scholars who are concerned with exploring various traditions and rhetorical discourse styles in and across European parliaments. Many investigations are increasingly based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodologies, whose main challenge is to try and integrate different approaches to the multifaceted manifestations of this discourse genre in a coherent system of analysis.

A historical perspective on national parliamentary discourses has the advantage of opening the way to a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices across time and space. It aims at highlighting the particular roles played by local socio-historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political institutions.

The perspective developed by political sciences contributes to shedding light upon the way social events are filtered by ideology and mapped onto discourse. The linguistic perspective focuses on integrating context-based socio-political observations into the framework of pragmatics and pragma-rhetorical analysis of discourse.

The conference will be held at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest.

Presentation format

a)Plenary speeches (45 minutes + 15 minutes discussion time):

- Kari Palonen, Academy of Finland Professor of Political Science, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
- Cornelia Ilie, Professor of English Linguistics, Malmö University, Sweden

b) Panels (20 minutes for each participant + 30 minutes discussion time):

- ‘Cross-European parliamentary concepts’ (convener: Prof. Kari Palonen)
- ‘Parliamentary Discourse in a Gender Perspective’ (convener: Prof. Shirin Rai and Dr. Clare Spary)
- ‘Tradition and Modernity in the Romanian Parliamentary Discourse: a Pragma-Rhetorical Approach’ (convener: Prof. Liliana Ionescu-Ruxandoiu)

c) Papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion time).

Conference languages: English and French.

Abstracts

Abstracts should have max. 300 words (no references) for panel participants as well as for individual papers. They should be in the language chosen for the presentation. The abstracts should be accompanied by the following data: author’s name, country, affiliation, email address.

Deadline for abstracts: May 1, 2011. The abstracts should be sent to the following email address: .

Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2011.

Conference proceedings: Plans are being made for the publication of selected presentations.