PALA, the international association for stylistics, is holding its annual conference in North America for only the second time in 37 years, this coming July, and America-based scholars are particularly invited to attend.

Stylistics has been an interdisciplinary enterprise since its infancy, emerging in the intersection between literary criticism and linguistics. M.A.K Halliday’s functionalist approach to the study of language led to the expansion of the scope of stylistics so as to incorporate social-semiotic concerns and methodologies and paved the way for a more context-sensitive approach to meaning-making. Critical stylistics, feminist stylistics, and pragmatic stylistics are some of the branches that emerged as a result of this expansion, and the field has not stopped growing since. PALA 2017 aims to investigate what interdisciplinarity currently means and invites papers that push the boundaries of the field and address new challenges for stylistics and its branches.

The conference theme is Interdisciplinary Stylistics. We particularly invite papers that discuss how stylistics has embraced cognitive, corpus, pedagogical, multimodal, and neuroscientific methodologies to explore how (literary) texts work, in addition to welcoming submissions from other relevant areas.

Confirmed plenary speakers:

• Prof. Margaret Freeman
  Myrifield Institute
• Prof. Anne Furlong
  University of Prince Edward Island
• Prof. Patrick C. Hogan
  University of Connecticut
• Prof. David Hoover
  New York University
• Prof. Dan McIntyre
  University of Huddersfield

More information at: http://www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/linguistics/PALA/announcements.aspx...

and at: http://www.pala.ac.uk/