From 4 to 6 February 2015 two conferences were held jointly at the University of Vigo: ELC4 and ASYRAS2015, both organised by four postgraduate members of the LVTC research group. These two conferences provided postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting which welcomed proposals from three different areas of research: linguistics, literature and cultural studies.
The Fourth International Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4) covered fields as diverse as grammar and morphosyntax, language change and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics, lexicology and semantics, contrastive and corpus linguistics, and linguistics applied to the teaching and acquisition of first and second languages. It was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments at the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela, together with the Department of Social and Experimental Psychology at Santiago de Compostela, and supported by the English Linguistics Circle and the LVTC research group.
The Exploring Liminality in Anglophone Studies Conference (ASYRAS 2015) aimed at reflecting on the present state of research in English Studies and offering distinct pathways to challenge classical interpretations of both artistic and critical works from a theoretical or analytical point of view. In this conference postgraduate researchers shared their ideas about the process of redefinition and update that most works of art or study are undergoing in our days due to the application of the complementary concepts of “marginal” vs “mainstream”, “standard” vs “substandard” or “liminal” vs “well-established” which may pertain to the literary, cultural or linguistic fields.
Apart from the different parallel sessions on linguistic, literary and cultural studies, there were five plenary lectures delivered by J. Carlos Acuña-Fariña (University of Santiago de Compostela), Pedro Álvarez-Mosquera (University of Salamanca), Marjolijn Verspoor (University of Groningen), Janet Wilson (University of Northampton) and Marilina Cesario (Queen’s University Belfast). Besides, ASYRAS2015 organised a Creative Writing Workshop by the award-winning writer Francisco Castro.
