11-13 June, 2014

London, UK

The International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse is a biennial symposium that advances the exchange of scholarship in discourse functional studies of the Chinese language, emphasizing an empirical orientation and encompassing such fields as discourse and grammar, variation and change, language contact, language and society, language and culture, and language and social interaction.

The third symposium will be held at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. The working language of the symposium will be English.

Abstracts are invited for oral presentations (25 minutes, plus 5 minutes for discussion) to showcase latest advancements in broadly-defined discourse functional studies of the Chinese language. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Corpora and Chinese language studies

Language variation, change and development

Language acquisition

Language contact and diversity

Language and interaction

Language and society

Language and culture

Language and cognition

An abstract of no more than 500 but no fewer than 300 words in English should be submitted to: roundtable@bbk.ac.uk. Please also include (i) author(s)’ name(s); (ii) affiliation; and (iii) email address.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Friday 10th January, 2014. Notification of acceptance: February, 2014

Keynote speakers:

Rint Sybesma (University of Leiden, The Netherlands)

Richard Xiao (University of Lancaster, UK)

Boping Yuan (University of Cambridge, UK)

There will be a Round Table on the teaching and learning of Chinese in the era of Globalization on Wednesday 11th June, 2014.

Invited Speakers for the Round Table:

Katherine Carruthers (Institute of Education, University of London, UK)

Amy Stambach (University of Oxford, UK)

Don Starr (University of Durham, UK)

Chun Zhang (University of Aarhus, Denmark)

Zhu Hua (Convenor, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK)

The registration fee to cover lunches, tea/coffee, and the delegate’s pack is £85 (eighty-five pounds) before 1st April 2014. We have kept it to the minimum and therefore there is no student discount or day rate. Late (after 1st April 2014) or on-site registrations will be charged at £120 (one hundred and twenty pounds).