CiLD 2026

Construal in Language and Discourse

21-23 September 2026
University of Łódź, Poland

 

The conference Construal in Language and Discourse invites contributions that examine construal as a central concept for understanding meaning construction across language, different forms of discourse, cognition, narrative, and multimodal communication.

In Cognitive Linguistics, construal refers to how speakers and writers conceptualise experience by selecting, structuring, profiling, foregrounding, backgrounding, and simulating aspects of a scene. This conference adopts and extends this view, proposing construal as a general cognitive operation of conceptualisation, applicable across linguistic levels, discourse structures, narrative forms, interactional settings, and communicative modalities.

The conference adopts a flexible view of the relationship between construal and linguistic expression/coding. Construal refers broadly to how events, participants, relations, inferences, evaluations, and temporal structures are conceptualised, framed, and made salient, while verbal and non-verbal resources—lexical, grammatical, prosodic, gestural, visual, and multimodal—are among the means through which such construals are communicated and negotiated in discourse.

Within Cognitive Linguistics, construal encompasses grammatical and lexical choices, constructional meaning, domain activation and knowledge structures, conceptualisation and simulation semantics, representational format, figure–ground organisation, metaphorical and metonymic processes, salience and prominence building, and narrative construal across extended discourse. Cognitive Linguistics is explicitly understood as extending beyond the sentence, encompassing discourse, genre, and narrative organisation.

From a discourse-pragmatic and narrative perspective, construal concerns how stories are built, maintained, contested, and reinterpreted in interaction. Topics include participant roles, directness vs indirectness, stance-taking, involvement vs. autonomy, framing and reframing, activation of metamessage and its strategic use, acceptance and rejection of frames, argumentation, strategic ambiguity, and narrative sequencing and evaluation. These issues are especially salient in institutional, forensic, and literary contexts, where competing construals of events, characters, intentions, and moral evaluations are at stake.

The conference explicitly welcomes contributions on forensic linguistics, where narrative construal is central to witness testimonies, police interviews, courtroom discourse, and legal storytelling, as well as work on literary discourse, where construal is shapes and is shaped by point of view, temporal structure, characterisation, and reader interpretation.

In addition, the conference invites work on gesture and multimodal communication, where narrative meaning is constructed across embodied, visual, and audiovisual modalities, and contributions at the interface with Cognitive Psychology, including memory, attention, consciousness, cognitive control, reasoning, and mental simulation.

By bringing together cognitive, narrative, interactional, pragmatic, forensic, literary, and multimodal approaches, the conference aims to establish construal as a unifying concept for understanding meaning in language and discourse.

CiLD 2026 Organizing Committee

Department of Linguistics and Communication, University of Łódź

Janusz Badio (Conference organiser, Chair of CiLD-2026) email: cild@uni.lodz.pl

Kamila Ciepiela (Deputy chair, CiLD Chair), 

Marek Molenda (Conference Secretary and IT)

Anna Pietruszewska (Conference Secretary): cild@uni.lodz.pl

Jakub Żak (IT Engineer)

 

We invite proposals for papers on: (the list is not meant to be exhaustive)

Cognitive Linguistics
Grammatical construal
Lexical construal 
Domain activation and knowledge structures
Conceptualisation and simulation semantics
Figure–ground organisation
Perspective, profiling, and scope
Metaphorical and metonymic construal
Salience and prominence building

Discourse, Pragmatics & Narrative
Participant roles and stance
Involvement vs. autonomy construal
Framing, reframing, and frame negotiation
Acceptance and rejection of frames
Indirectness
Interpersonal communication
Metamessages and implicit meaning
Strategic ambiguity and indirectness
Dynamic structure building in discourse
Narrative sequencing and coherence
Storytelling as interactional practice
Narrative evaluation 

Sociology & Social Interaction

Construal of social roles 
Power, authority
Moral and normative construal
Ideological framing and social meaning
Construal in public, political, and media discourse

Narrative, Storytelling & Literature

Storytelling as discourse practice
Narrative sequencing and coherence
Temporal construal and causality
Perspective, focalisation, and point of view
Character construal and evaluation
Narrative framing in legal, institutional, and everyday discourse
Literary narrative and reader construal
Genre-specific narrative construal

Publication
Selected papers from the conference may be invited for submission to a peer-reviewed special issue of Research in Language, subject to the journal’s standard review procedures.

Submission Guidelines

We invite proposals for individual papers (20-minute presentation + 10-minute discussion)

Abstracts should be: 

• No more than 200 words

• Submitted in English

• Accompanied by a short biographical note (max. 100 words) and 3–5 keywords

Please submit your Abstract through the following LINK TO SEND ABSTRACT
Deadline for abstract submission: [31 May 2026]
Notification of acceptance: [14 June 2026]

Registration and fee payment deadline: [24 August 2026]: link tba

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdańsk, Poland

Alan Cienki, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Henryk Kardela, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland 

Krzysztof Kredens, Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, University of Łódź, Poland


 

REGISTRATION FORM
PAYMENTS:
The fee, which covers organisation costs, conference materials, lunches, and refreshments, is 900 PLN for participants working at Polish institutions (750 PLN for students) and 250 Euro for participants from other countries (200 Euro for students). The deadline for registration and bank payments is August 24th, 2026. The fee should be transferred to the CiLD 2026 bank account (see below; bank transfer charges are the responsibility of the payer).

Please make payments to the university bank account: (NOTE: please remember to specify your name and the name of the conference – CILD 2026.

Account holder:
Uniwersytet Łódzki / University of Łódź
KF26 (CiLD) Construal in Language and Discourse
IBAN: PL 11 1240 3028 1111 0011 6305 7199
BIC/SWIFT: PKOPPLPW
Bank: Bank Polska Kasa Opieki S.A., II Oddział w Łodzi
ul. Piotrkowska 270, 90-361 Łódź 

For participants from Poland – additional financial information
Osoby, które będą potrzebowały faktury, prosimy o dokonanie płatności przelewem najpóźniej do 24.08.2026 i wpisanie danych do faktury w formularzu zgłoszeniowym. 
Dane do faktury dla uczestnika konferencji ‘CiLD 2026’:
Imię i nazwisko:
Nazwa i adres instytucji:
NIP Instytucji:
Upoważniam Uniwersytet Łódzki w Łodzi do wystawienia faktury VAT bez mojego podpisu:
Data i czytelny podpis
 

CONFERENCE VENUE
The conference is planned for three full days, 21-23 September 2026. The conference will be held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz (Pomorska 171/173)

ACCOMMODATION
We recommend the University of Lodz Conference Centre (Kopcińskiego 16/18 – 15-minute walk from the conference venue)
Close to the venue are:

1. Arche Residence, Łódź www.archeresidencelodz.pl
2. A budget option is BB Consul

A little further away is Villa Masoneria (rezerwacja.villamasoneria@gmail.com)

Lodz airport

(LCJ) currently has regular connections to London (STN), Nottingham, Birmingham, Dublin, Alicante, Malaga, Brussels, and Milan.
Lodz is also easily accessible by train from

Warsaw airport

(WAW), which has a wide range of international flights.
The faculty building is situated between the intercity hubs Lodz Widzew and Lodz Fabryczna, and is within walking distance from the local stations Lodz Niciarniana and Lodz Stoki. The intercity train timetable is

here

.

E-mail: cild@uni.lodz.pl

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