[PLing] INFO: Language as Human Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García (Panel 2.0) @ DGKL/GCLA11

[Ilia Afanasev]

This panel is a continuation of the first panel “Language as Human 
Behaviour: The Legacy of William Diver and Érica García”, which took 
place in 2025 as part of the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics 
Conference (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and brought together scholars from 
all over the world.

The panel is dedicated to the functionally-oriented linguistic framework 
initiated by William Diver, Érica García and their students at Columbia 
University in the 1960s has come to be known as Columbia School (CS) 
linguistics. It is based on two fundamental understandings:
- that language is an instance of human behavior, so it can be “expected 
to share characteristics that are found in other aspects of human 
activity and cognition” (Stern 2019, p. 3);
- that language is an instrument inherently designed for communication, 
so “it must be the case that its fundamental structural components be 
signals and meanings; that is, that language share in the characteristic 
that is common to all instruments of communication” (Diver 2012, p. 47).

Originally born as a reaction to the empirical failure of formalist 
approaches, the aim of CS is to discover how language is structured 
based on facts of actual usage. It adopts an inductive approach with the 
objective of accounting for the way language is effectively exploited by 
human beings.

CS research has the following distinctive features:

- an “aposterioristic” (Huffman 2006, p. 44) approach to linguistic 
analysis: no categories are assumed, but rather hypotheses are proposed 
and tested based on empirical data;
- an understanding that linguistic structure is not autonomous, but 
invariably motivated by the communicative needs and the physical, 
cognitive, and cultural traits of human beings;
- an instrumental view of meaning: it is recognized that language is not 
compositional; rather, linguistic inputs serve as mere hints from which 
messages can be contextually inferred;
- a fundamental interest in explanation: the ultimate goal is to 
understand the non-random patterns of sound/writing/signing produced for 
human communication;
- a reliance on naturally occurring discourse as a basis for linguistic 
analysis;
- a qualitative-quantitative methodology: close textual analysis is 
combined with testing of predictions regarding the “relative frequency 
of use” (Martínez 2009, p. 268) of the item(s) under study in specific 
contexts. The purpose of this session is to offer a forum for the 
dissemination of some of the latest findings in CS research, and foster 
discussion and debate within and outside the framework.

The possible topics of the submissions may include:
* Cognitive grammar
* Lexical semantics
* Phonology
* Pragmatics
* Language variation and change
* Language contact and multilingualism
* Applied linguistics
* Endangered languages

Deadline for abstract submission:
01.05.2026 (UTC-12, AoE)

Please send your abstracts (no more than 1 A4 page, Times New Roman 12, 
single-spaced, excluding examples and references) to 
ilia.afanasev.1997 at gmail.com (Ilia Afanasev) and dpvansoeren at gmail.com 
(Daan van Soeren)