The programme is now available in PDF format: SDAŠ2019 Programme. The current version was updated on September 13th with some new information on lecture rooms and social programme meeting points.

Plenary Lectures

Michael Ashby, University College London, United Kingdom: A hundred years of English speech: What’s changed, and what hasn’t.

Only a quarter of the 1.35 billion users of English worldwide are native speakers. The rest learn English as a lingua franca for science, medicine, business or academia. But the global uniformity of the written English they employ is not matched by any corresponding international pronunciation. A standard British accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), has been one widely adopted model. But cultural attitudes to the notion “standard” have changed radically over the last century, and the pronunciation target itself has evolved over time. This paper charts some of the changes in RP and in the position it holds, and considers the implications for teachers and learners of English.

Short CV: Michael Ashby is Honorary Senior Lecturer (Emeritus) in Phonetics at University College London (UCL). From 2007 to 2014 he was Director of UCL’s Summer Course in English Phonetics, which celebrates its centenary in 2019. Over the years, he has accepted numerous invitations to teach and lecture on phonetics across the world from Chile to Japan. His published papers and reviews extend over more than 40 years. Since 1995 he has been Phonetics Editor of successive editions of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the world’s largest-selling dictionary for learners of English. His book Introducing Phonetic Science (2005), written jointly with UCL colleague John Maidment, has been widely adopted as a course text around the world. He is a Member of Council of the International Phonetic Association, and has served two terms as its Treasurer. His current main research field is in the history of phonetics. In this connection, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas.

Patricia Ashby, University of Westminster, United Kingdom: Does pronunciation = phonetics?

The short answer to this question is: not exactly, no. This talk will look at what phonetics actually is, and attempt to dispel the popular myth that “(English) phonetics” and “(English) pronunciation” are one and the same thing. Reviewing 100 years of thoughts about pronunciation teaching (from Daniel Jones to Alan Cruttenden) it examines the contribution phonetics is considered to make in this field, looking at pronunciation acquisition from teachers’ and learners’ perspectives, and at end goals from passable to perfection. It concludes by considering the rather shaky position of phonetics as a subject of study in higher education today.

Short CV: Patricia Ashby is an Emeritus Fellow to the University of Westminster and a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In addition to teaching at the University of Westminster for over 30 years, she taught phonetics and phonology all over the world, including Belgium, Germany, India, Poland, Spain and Japan, and in the UK at the universities of Reading, Oxford and UCL. Since retiring, in 2011, she has continued (as an Occasional Lecturer) teaching on the UCL Summer Course in English Phonetics and running workshops around the world on English Phonetics, the pronunciation of English, and on phonetic pedagogy. Her main research interests are in the areas of phonetic pedagogy, allophonic variation in English speech, and English intonation. She is the author of a number of books on phonetics including the popular Speech Sounds (1995 and 2005), and Understanding Phonetics (2011), both published by Routledge. She is a Member of Council of the International Phonetic Association, for which she is also the Examinations Secretary, and a member of the British Association for Academic Phoneticians.

Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven, Belgium: Do learners know how to do pragmatics? Well…sort of.

After Charles Morris’s (1938) initial impetus to complement the traditional duo of syntax and semantics with a third field, it took until well into the 1970s and even the 1980s before pragmatics came to prominence. Since the late 1980s the interest in learner language has also been fanned. Particularly thanks to technological advances enabling the compilation of spoken learner corpora, these two evolutions have crossed paths in the past two decades. This lecture will zoom in on a specific type of pragmatic items that have proved particularly challenging to define, classify and interpret in context, viz. pragmatic markers. These can be defined as words or phrases that do not belong to the propositional message of an utterance (and are hence semantically and syntactically optional), but contribute to it in various subtle ways, e.g. by expressing speakers’ attitudes to their interlocutors or to the message, or by making plain which relations hold between an utterance and its co-text or context. Pragmatic markers (e.g. so, you know, I mean, well, sort of, actually) abound in native discourse but they are often neglected in learning materials for non-native speakers, which raises questions as to the incidence and use of these markers in learner language. This lecture will offer an overview of the main tendencies in how and how often a selection of the most common pragmatic markers are used in native and learner discourse across learners of English with different mother tongue backgrounds.

Short CV: Lieven Buysse holds a PhD in Linguistics from Ghent University (Belgium) as well as a Master’s degree in Dutch and English Linguistics and Literature from the same university. He is currently Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven (Belgium). After having served six years as Vice-Dean of Education, he has been Campus Dean at the University’s Brussels campus since 2017. He takes on an active role in various associations that focus on either the study of English or the areas relevant for his faculty. As such, he was the President of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) until last year, served as a Board Member of ESSE for six years, and is currently the Secretary-General of CIUTI (global association of high-quality Translation & Interpreting departments), and founding Treasurer of the European Network for Public Service Interpreting and Translation. His research interests are mainly in pragmatics, discourse analysis and learner English. In this area he is also the Reviews Editor of the journal Corpus Pragmatics (published at Springer).

Alberto Lázaro, University of Alcalá, Spain: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: A Journey Through Censorship

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, is one of the classics of English literature, and it is a biting satire of English customs and politics in particular and of human foibles in general. Divided into four books, the story relates different adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who travels to imaginary lands. Everyone is familiar with the island of Lilliput, where people are six inches tall, and the land of giants, another land in which the people do not understand the customs and behaviours of Gulliver’s country. Less known is the third journey to the flying island of Laputa, full of academics obsessed with their own speculations; also less known is the last book, which takes Gulliver to the country of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent and ethical horses that are more rational and benevolent than the filthy and brutish humanoid race called Yahoos. However, ordinary readers have seldom had the opportunity to fully appreciate the satiric spirit of the book, since Gulliver’s Travels has usually been censored, abridged or relegated to the children’s shelf, which is a form of indirect censorship. This lecture aims to explore the ways in which Gulliver’s Travels has been altered and censored, from the moment it was first published in 1726 to the present time. Swift’s coarse language, scatological references and bawdy scenes have often been considered too explicit and politically incorrect for many translators, publishers and censors, who have made the reading of this text a very different experience from what the author had intended.

Short CV: Alberto Lázaro is Professor of English Literature at the University of Alcalá, Spain, where he has been teaching English literature since 1987. He has done extensive research on British and Irish fiction, devoting particular attention to modernism, censorship and translation. He has published The Road from George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy (2001), James Joyce in Spain: A Critical Bibliography (2002, co-authored with Antonio Raúl de Toro), H. G. Wells en España (H. G. Wells in Spain, 2004), El modernismo en la novela inglesa (Modernism in the British Novel, 2005), Censorship across Borders (2011, co-edited with Catherine O’Leary), and edited the Spanish translation of Claude Cockburn’s Reporter in Spain (2012). He is also the author of many articles and essays on censorship and the reception of British and Irish authors in Spain, among them essays on Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and H. G. Wells in three volumes of The Reception of British Authors in Europe series, edited by Elinor Shaffer and published in London by Continuum.

Social Programme

The social programme will include:

• a literary tour of Ljubljana (Wednesday, 17:00-18:30, meeting point: Ljubljana Tourist Information Center, Adamič-Lundrovo nabrežje 2),
• a tour of the National and University Library (Thursday, 9:00-9:30, meeting point: Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2),
• a welcome reception (Thursday, 19:00-21:00, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2),
• a conference dinner (Friday, 19:00).