International Symposium

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ambiguity:
Linguistics, Literary Studies and Rhetoric

Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen
Postgraduate Program “Dimensions of Ambiguity”
Schloss Hohentübingen
November 5-7, 2009


Call for Papers

Phenomena of ambiguity provide an interesting and controversial area of research for linguistics and literary studies as well as for rhetoric. A particularly rewarding field of enquiry is the resolution and production of ambiguity in text, speech, gestures and images.

The aim of this conference is to bring together the stimuli of these perspectives and focus on the dimensions of ambiguity within an interdisciplinary dialogue. We intend to address the following questions:

• How is ambiguity processed and resolved?
• How does ambiguity arise? How can it be generated?
• What is the communicative value of ambiguity?

The following aspects may provide a first approach to the discussion:

• Ellipsis and ambiguity in public speeches at the interface between syntax, semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics;

• The relationship between linguistic ambiguities and ambiguous subject matter in literary texts (possible examples are the different versions of the last sentence of Dickens’s Great Expectations or the letter A becoming an ambiguous sign in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter);

• The status of mishearings and mondegreens at the prelexical and lexical level within a model of language processing;

• Beyond the ambiguity of linguistic signs: the ambiguity of the signified, e.g. conceptual figure-ground-effects and their manifestations in language;

• Ambiguity in visual sign systems, e.g. in images, films or gesture-based texts.

We invite abstracts for 30-minute-talks (plus 30 minutes for discussion).
Please send your abstracts (200 - 300 words) until May 31, 2009 to ambiguity@nphil.uni-tuebingen.de.

For further information, go to: http://www.ambiguitaet.uni-tuebingen.de.