In 1999, the 6th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference was hosted by Stockholm University. Since then, interest has been felt by many Swedish scholars of various disciplines in creating a national Cognitive Linguistics Association. After the 9th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Seoul in July 2005, many voices were again heard around Sweden expressing renewed enthusiasm for a Swedish association, which might gather under its umbrella scholars committed to the study of cognitive aspects of communication.
These scholars are active in fields as varied as cognitive science, linguistics, inter-cultural communication, research on gesture, mimesis, psychology, sociology, computer science, corpus-based analysis, metaphor, blending, humour, advertising, the impact of technological development, to mention only a few examples.
Finally, in November 2005, at the annnual workshop, at the University of Lund, entitled Semantik I Fokus, Ulf Magnusson, now Emeritus Professor of English at Luleå University of Technology, brought up the idea of forming a Swedish Cognitive Linguistics Association, partly at the request of colleagues and postgraduate students in English linguistics at the universities of Umeå and Luleå. The suggestion was received very favourably at the Lund workshop and it was felt that a bridge had been struck between the extreme north and the extreme south of Sweden. Ulf Magnusson was encouraged to go ahead and prepare an invitation for membership and a Call for Papers for a conference at which the actual association was to be constituted.
The International Conference and Constituting Meeting of the Swedish Cognitive Linguistics Association on June 15-17, 2006, at the University of Umeå in Sweden is that conference.
In our invitation we expressed a wish that the suggested association should avoid any narrow-minded dogmatic perspective and that scholars from all disciplines with an interest in cognitive aspects of language and communication should feel that they have something to contribute as well as something to gain by joining the association. The association as such will be formed at the Business Meeting to be held during the conference.
The organising committee, first an informal cluster of enthusiasts and then, as we were informed that our application for grants from Vetenskapsrådet had been successful, a more disciplined team, are pleased to be able to invite participants to the campus of Umeå University, Sweden. The Department of Modern Languages very generously accepted to act as the venue of the conference and to support it in various ways. Thanks to the financial resources placed at our disposal, we now have the great pleasure of welcoming to our latitudes Dr. Vyvyan Evans, University of Sussex, Brighton and Professors Seana Coulson, University of California, San Diego, Lena Ekberg, University of Lund, Suzanne Kemmer, Rice University, Houston, Texas, and Chris Sinha, University of Portsmouth, as plenary speakers.
We hope that this conference will offer an opportunity for junior and senior scholars to meet, for the established research community of today to share their experience with that of tomorrow and for rewarding conversations to take place between presentations.
This page will be constantly updated and supplemented with additional information as regards conference programme, abstracts, registration procedures and local information.
Ulf Magnusson
Chairman of the Organising Committee
We wish to thank Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council)
, John Benjamins Publishing Company
and the Department of Modern Languages, Umeå University, for sponsoring this conference.
The webmaster and creator of this site is Arvin Johansson Arbab (threord@hotmail.com)