The American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) comprises the countries of North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean. AMPRA supports interaction and scholarly debate with particular regard to the linguistic, cognitive, historical, social, inter-cultural and inter-language paradigms of pragmatics.
The 4th Conference of the American Pragmatics Association is to be held on November 1-3, 2018 at the University at Albany, State University of New York (1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, USA 12222). The goal of the conference is to promote both theoretical and applied research in pragmatics, and bring together scholars who are interested in different sub-fields of pragmatics. The four main topical strands of the conference are as follows:
(i) Pragmatics theories: neo-Gricean approaches, relevance theory, theory of mind, meaning, role of context, common ground, semantics-pragmatics interface, explicature, implicature, speech act theory, presuppositions, grammaticalization, im/politeness, etc.
(ii) Experimental pragmatics: models of language and meaning, experimental techniques, scalar implicatures, reference resolution, interpretation of figurative language, etc.
(iii) Intercultural, cross-cultural and societal aspects of pragmatics: research involving more than one language and culture, or varieties of one language, intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, variational pragmatics, social pragmatics, lingua franca, computer-mediated communication (CMC), bilinguals’ and heritage speakers’ language use, intercultural misunderstandings, effect of dual language and multilingual systems on the development and use of pragmatic skills, language of aggression and conflict, etc.
(iv) Applications: usage and corpus-based approaches, pragmatic competence, teachability and learnability of pragmatic skills, pragmatic variations within one language and across languages, developmental pragmatics, cyber pragmatics, etc.
The journals associated with AMPRA are: Intercultural Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter), Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier) and Pragmatics & Society (John Benjamins).
If you are selected as a presenter of AMPRA-4 and require a personal letter of invitation from the conference organizers to apply for a visa, please email your request to the Chair of AMPRA4 at mkirner-ludwig@albany.edu. Please provide the following information in your request:
full name as it appears on your passport
professional title and/or rank
academic institution you represent (if applicable) mailing address
telephone number
email address
Upon receipt, review, and approval of your request, the letter of invitation will be emailed to you. This invitation letter can then be provided as part of your visa application. Please make your letter of invitation request well in advance to ensure you receive your letter with ample time to apply for your visa; the visa application process can take many months to complete.
