The Ohio State University department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm (OSU) and Andrea Golato (U of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign) present Symposium:Reference in Interaction from a Cross-Cultural Perspective.
This symposium concentrates on reference to objects, space, time, and location, as well as the role that prosody and gesture play in referential work in oral discourse. Contributions from different language families allow for cross-linguistic comparisons identifying universal principles of reference but also cultural variability. The symposium will include invited speakers whose research has engaged some aspects of reference in conversation in Farsi, French, Fulfulde, German, Japanese, Korean, and Transylvanian German. The main goal of this symposium is to provide a forum for the contributors to share their recent findings in their respected language and to engage in a discussion about interdisciplinary questions of language use and cultural variability of human sociality
