A Spring School on "Empirical methods in usage-based linguistics" will take place on the two days preceding the conference, i.e. 13-14 May. More information can be obtained by clicking on the link "Spring School '"Empirical Methods...") on the left.

This conference chiefly aims at consolidating and strengthening the network of cognitive linguists working in France and abroad by providing a forum for discussion and collaboration in the tradition of the preceding AFLiCo conferences in Bordeaux (2005), Lille (2007), Nanterre (2009) and Lyon (2011) and the ‘JET’ workshops in Bordeaux (2010) and Paris (2012). The conference’s major foci are in line with the direction the previous AFLiCo conferences were headed in: multi-modality (in particular, co-verbal gestures and signed languages viewed as multi-channel communication systems) and linguistic variation (typology as well as intra-language variation). However, the conference seeks to add an important dimension to this direction, viz. empirical methods in (cognitive) linguistics, which have recently been attracting growing interest. With this emphasis on empirical approaches, the conference meets a real need of the linguistic community (cognitive or otherwise), given that the field of linguistics is shifting ever more rapidly towards interdisciplinary approaches, using various advanced empirical methods, ranging from psycholinguistic experiments to sophisticated analyses based on (large) corpora.