Seminaarit ja konferenssit: Writing Voice and Speaking Text

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies SYMPOSIUM WRITING VOICE AND SPEAKING TEXT An Interdisciplinary Enquiry into Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Speech

7-8 June 2018 University of Helsinki, Finland

Organizers: Josephine Hoegaerts, Ann Phoenix, Ilya Sverdlov and Mari Wiklund, in collaboration with Langnet

Researchers in the humanities are experts at analyzing text: they mine it for discursive meaning, document semiotic shifts, find clues about social realities and study syntactic structures. Language, however, exists (and is constantly practiced and reproduced) in less permanent forms as well. Spoken or signed, language can be eerie, temporal and inherently fragile. The precise relationship between these anchored (diachronic, written) instances of linguistic utterance, and the more fleeting (synchronic, spoken) ones is difficult to define – even if the written text analyzed is a tran of speech, or if the spoken word is read off the page.

In this symposium we want to address the links and tensions between spoken and written language exactly in those instances they seem to mirror or mimic each other, as in prepared media interviews (print or broadcast), drama, speech-to-text interpretation or transcribed speeches or interviews By bringing together different disciplinary perspectives on the relation between speech and text, we want to facilitate a discussion on the various methodological problems that arise from the uneasy relation between speech and text for current research questions in linguistics, sociology, history, folklore studies and literature.