Call for Papers

Ecological issues have long been investigated by scholars across sciences and the humanities; more recently, after the devastating effects of climate change, they have also come to the attention of politicians, policy-makers and the wider public.

Inspired by a lively debate among linguists as well as scientists, journalists and activists, PALA 2023 aims to investigate connections between style and the natural environment broadly conceived as the air, water, and land inhabited by people, animals, and plants. PALA 2023 will explore such connections in a wide range of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, across different text-types and genres and from the point of view of single disciplines, as well as from multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multimodal perspectives.

Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The style of climate crisis and sustainability: evolution, changes, contexts and prospects
• Literal and figurative framings of environmental degradation
• Linguistic and multimodal narratives of sustainability
• Ecostylistics and sustainability communication
• "Green" stylistics in the context of language education
• Narratives of sustainability and climate change in social media and the new media

We will be interested in any abstracts that address these and similar issues, but also that explore broader areas of stylistics and, in particular, its relationships to other disciplines such as pragmatics, semantics, narratology, literary studies, cultural studies, language teaching, translation and others.

We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations and posters.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to the following email address: lilec.pala2023@unibo.it

Abstracts should be sent as email attachments in .doc, .docx or .rtf format and should be named ‘Surname_Abstract_PALA 2023’. They should contain the following structural elements:

(a) title;

(b) your full name, academic position, academic affiliation, email address, postal address;

(c) a recognisable thesis/statement or research question;

(d) an explanation of the methodology;

(e) a short reference to emerging results (if applicable)

(f) a list of keywords;

(g) a short list of key references (max. 3).

The deadline for submission of abstracts is January 31st. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by March 1st