The French Cognitive Linguistics Association (AFLiCo) is pleased to announce its 10^th international conference (AFLiCo10), to be held in Paris from June 22^nd to June 24^th 2026. The theme of the conference will be Interaction and Discourse. 

Going back to Clark’s (1996) joint action hypothesis, language is seen as a joint activity, which draws on a common ground shared among speakers, who have to constantly coordinate with each other in order to make their intentions known to the discourse participants. Central to the concept of common ground is the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Tomasello, 1999) and the conventions that are intersubjectively shared by speakers both for the production and the interpretation of an utterance. These conventions can also be recognized through multimodal cues, as people make use of different non-verbal elements when they communicate (Norris, 2004). 

Multimodality has been at the center of several studies, allowing a more fine-grained analysis of discourse use from different sources, such as animations, films, commercials (see, for example, Forceville, 2024; Forceville, 2025), television series and shows, memes, etc. Such studies have focused on the role that non-verbal markers play in the production and interpretation of discourse (for example, Cienki, 2008; McNeill, 2008; Lapaire, 2013, and many others). This has opened new pathways for research on gaze (Brône et al., 2017; Brône & Oben, 2018), eye-tracking studies (Zima et al., in print), prosodic cues, facial expressions, among others. Corpus studies thus allow more data and theories to be tested (Gilquin, 2024).

Public and mediated discourse has been extensively studied in cognitive linguistics, particularly with regard to political speeches, media interviews, and journalistic narratives (Chilton, 2004; Hart, 2013; Musolff, 2016; Koller 2025). Such forms of discourse offer fertile ground for analyzing how stance-taking, metaphor, and conceptual framing shape collective understanding and interaction in the public sphere. In a rapidly evolving media landscape, continued research is essential to account for new discursive practices, notably in relation to emerging platforms and shifting patterns of audience engagement.

We encourage contributions that explore the multifaceted interplay between discourse and interaction from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We invite papers on, but not limited to, the following themes: 

• Multimodality
• Interaction
• Gesture studies
• Discourse analysis (political discourse, metaphor and/or metonymy)
• Emotion, facial expressions 
• Humor (irony and/or sarcasm, wordplay, spontaneous and non-spontaneous, etc.)
• Stance-taking /intersubjectivity 
• Common ground 
• Didactics and L1/L2 acquisition
• Eye-tracking studies
• Corpus studies

Abstracts of no longer than 500 words (excluding references), in English or French, should be submitted via this website. 

References

Baron-Cohen, Simon. 1995. Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brône, Geert & Oben, Bert. 2018. Eye-Tracking in Interaction. Studies on the Role of Eye Gaze in Dialogue. (Advances in Interaction Studies). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Brône, Geert, Oben, Bert, Jehoul, Annelies, Vranjes, Jelena & Feyaerts, Kurt. 2017. Eye gaze and viewpoint in multimodal interaction management. Cognitive Linguistics, 28 (3), pp. 449-483. 

Chilton, Paul. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.

Cienki, Alan. 2008. Why study metaphor and gesture? In Alan Cienki & Cornelia Müller (Eds.), Metaphor and gesture. 5—25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forceville, Charles, J. 2025. Metaphors in Stand Up 2 Cancer animations. Metaphor and the Social World.

Forceville, Charles. 2024. Identifying and Interpreting Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Commercials and Feature Films. Metaphor and Symbol, 39(1), 40-54. 

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. 2024. From second language acquisition research to foreign language teaching through the prism of corpora. Ampersand 13, 100204.

Hart, Christopher. (2013). Event-construal in press reports of violence in two recent political protests: A cognitive linguistic approach to CDA. Journal of Language and Politics, 12(3), 400-423.

Koller, Veronika. (2025). "Chapter 17 Discourse and Cognition". In Contemporary Linguistics: Integrating Languages, Communities, and Technologies. Leiden: Brill.

Lapaire, Jean-Rémi. 2013. Gestualité cogrammaticale : de l'action corporelle spontanée aux postures de travail métagestuel guidé. ‘Maybe’ et le balancement épistémique en anglais. Langages 4. 57—72.

Musolff, Andreas. (2016). Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.

Norris, Sigrid. 2004. Analyzing multimodal interaction: A methodological framework. New York: Routledge.

Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zima, Elisabeth, Auer, Peter & Rühlemann, Christoph (in print). Why multimodal interaction research on gaze needs mobile eyetracking. In: Stukenbrock, A. & E. Zima (eds). Mobile Eyetracking: new avenues for the study of gaze in social interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (Pragmatics & Beyond).