UPF is organizing the 28th ConSOLE international conference on linguistics
It is a conference for doctoral students that has gained international prestige and is to take place from 28 to 31 January in the auditorium of the Poblenou campus. It is being organized by postgraduate students from the faculty of Translation and Language Sciences and overseen by professor Louise McNally.
ConSOLE is an annual conference held in a different European university each year and is organized by and for postgraduate students. The 28th edition is to take place from 28 to 31 January in the auditorium of the Poblenou campus, organized by UPF student researchers of the Faculty of Translation and Language Sciences.
The organizing committee members are the students: Josep Ausensi, Sara Cañas, Zi Huang, Alexandra Navarrete González, Raquel Veiga Busto, Chenjie Yuan and Giorgia Zorzi, all members of the Formal Linguistics research group (GLIF); Florence Baills and Ingrid Vilà-Giménez of the Prosodic Studies group (GrEP), and Rut Benito and Núria de Rocafiguera Montanyà of Language Acquisition from Multilingual Catalonia (ALLENCAM).
In the organization of the conference, the organizers have had to select the guest speakers, manage the call for participation and the paper evaluation process, draw up the programme for ConSOLE, chair the sessions and edit the corresponding minutes.
Of all the conferences that are exclusively for linguistics students it is perhaps the most competitive, explains Louise MacNally, a lecturer of the Faculty and member of the GLIF at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences. And she adds that “student conferences are very important because they provide an opportunity to gain experience in all aspects of the organization of a scientific event”.
As McNally, professor in charge of the event, continues, “the meeting brings together young linguists from across the world. There will be a total of 60 participants from Europe, America and Asia who are set to be professional colleagues in the future. In addition, the researchers presenting their work are sure to receive highly useful comments and suggestions to continue with their research”.
ConSOLE has become the most internationally prestigious doctoral student conference
The organizers have invited 6 speakers, each of whom is an expert in some of the key areas of linguistics, namely syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology/phonetics, language acquisition and experimental methods. One of the guest speakers is Laia Mayol, an expert in pragmatics and semantics and a researcher with the GLIF at UPF, who will open the sessions of presentations on 29 January, from 10 to 11 am.
This year’s meeting also has a satellite event organized by Laura Aina and Ionut-Teodor Sorodoc, members of the COLT (Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory) research group. It aims to introduce students and researchers in linguistics in general to computational methods that are useful for the study of language.
With the passage of time and conference after conference, ConSOLE has become the most internationally prestigious doctoral student conference, especially within the European context. Recent editions of this congress have been held in different European institutions of great prestige: University of Leipzig (2017), University College London (2018) and Humboldt University (2019).
Aimed at doctoral students doing a programme in linguistics or similar, ConSOLE invites doctoral students to present both their theoretical and practical work within all fields of linguistics, i.e., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonology, phonetics as well as within different methodologies, such as formal, experimental and computational.