The final programme and all abstracts can be downloaded as PDF files; an outline of the programme is included below:

• Final programme
• Abstracts

Should your computer not have the appropriate software, free PDF readers include Foxit Reader and Adobe Reader.

Morning programme: plenary session

10.00 am	Welcome coffee / Registration / Book exhibition
10.30 am	Plenary lecture by Barbara Dancygier (University of British Columbia) 'O happy dagger!' Material objects as discourse participants in dramatic and poetic discourse [abstract and short bio]
11.45 am	BAAHE Annual General Meeting with president's address, treasurer's report, and presentation of the BAAHE 2008 Thesis Award
12.30 pm	Sandwich and quiche lunch (Le Pain Quotidien)

Afternoon programme: parallel sessions

Literature (1.30-3 pm)

1.30 pm	Frederik Van Dam (K.U.Leuven) Character and the career: Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn and the rhetoric of the Victorian state
2 pm	Ilka Saal (U Richmond/Ghent U) “Hmp, Utopia!”: Realism, myth, and melodrama in David Belasco's Girl of the Golden West
2.30 pm	Manel Msalmi (ULg) Ecocriticism and ecofeminism
3 pm	Coffee break / Book exhibition

Translation studies (3.30-5 pm)

3.30 pm	Peter Flynn (Lessius) Translators' narratives and their contribution to a deeper understanding of translation practice
4 pm	Michael Boyden (UC Ghent) Translation and linguistic justice
4.30 pm	Dirk Delabastita (FUNDP) Language, comedy and translation in the BBC sitcom 'Allo 'Allo

Linguistics (1.30-5 pm)

1.30 pm	Dirk Noël (U Hong Kong) and Johan van der Auwera (UA) Applying diachronic construction grammar: The development of deontic be supposed to
2 pm	Lieselotte Brems (K.U.Leuven) The grammaticalization of size noun expressions: A diachronic corpus study
2.30 pm	Tom Brzyk, Kristin Davidse and Sigi Vandewinkel (K.U.Leuven) Adjectives of purity as a case for distinguishing contextual from reinforcing emphasizers
3 pm	Coffee break / Book exhibition
3.30 pm	Timothy Colleman and Bernard De Clerck (Ghent U) Constructional semantics on the move: A diachronic account of the English ditransitive construction
4 pm	Daniël Van Olmen (UA) Look versus listen in English versus Dutch
4.30 pm	Astrid De Wit (UvA) and Frank Brisard (UA) A semantic analysis of the English present progressive in Cognitive Grammar

English Language Teaching (1.30-5 pm)

1.30 pm	Kris Van de Poel (UA) Developing an academic writing programme for beginners: Changing practice in applied linguistics
2 pm	Sylvie De Cock (UCLouvain/FUSL) To contract or not to contract: Contracted forms in native and learner speech and writing
2.30 pm	Katrien Deroey (Ghent U) Corpus-informed EAP syllabus design: A study of lecture functions
3 pm	Coffee break / Book exhibition
3.30 pm	Jianwei Xu (UA) Attitude and confidence in using English as a foreign language at tertiary level
4 pm	William Petty (ULB) Spatial constraints on the expression of cause in English: Evidence from note-taking
4.30 pm	Deogratias Nizonkiza (UA) Lexical competence as a predictor of L2 proficiency

Conference closing

5 pm	Send off drink / Book exhibition

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Plenary lecture

Barbara Dancygier (University of British Columbia)
'O, happy dagger!' Material objects as discourse participants in dramatic and poetic discourse

The occurrence of material objects functioning as speakers and addressees seems specific to dramatic and poetic discourse in interesting ways. Cases in point include Juliet exclaiming "O, happy dagger!" to announce her suicide, or the drug in Szymborska's poem "Advertisement" asking the potential user to "have faith in [its] chemical compassion". The aim of this talk is to analyze the cognitive mechanisms underlying such uses from the perspective of conceptual integration or 'blending', as defined in the work of Fauconnier and Turner (e.g. their 2002 book The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities).

Short bio

Barbara Dancygier is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of British Columbia (Vancouver). She has published two books on conditionals with Cambridge University Press (Conditionals and prediction in 1998 and, together with Eve Sweetser, Mental spaces in grammar in 2005) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on various topics in cognitive linguistics. In recent years she has devoted a lot of attention to the application of cognitive linguistic insights to literature, as evidenced for instance in the special issue on blending she guest-edited for Language and Literature in 2006, or indeed in her own (2005) paper in the same journal on narrative viewpoint in Jonathan Raban's fiction. She is currently preparing a monograph on the narrative as well as a volume co-edited with Eve Sweetser on viewpoint.

Representative publications on conditionals:

• (1993) Interpreting conditionals: Time, knowledge and causation. Journal of Pragmatics 19: 403-434.
• (1997) together with Eve Sweetser. "Then" in conditional constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 8 (2): 109-136.
• (1998) Conditionals and prediction: Time, knowledge and causation in conditional constructions (Cambridge studies in linguistics 87). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• (2002) Mental space embeddings, counterfactuality, and the use of unless. English Language and Linguistics 6 (2): 347–377.
• (2005) together with Eve Sweetser. Mental Spaces in grammar: Conditional constructions (Cambridge studies in linguistics 108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Representative publications on the narrative:

• (2004) Identity and perspective: the Jekyll-and-Hyde effect in narrative discourse. In Michel Achard and Susanne Kemmer (eds.) Language, culture, and mind. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 363–376.
• (2005) Blending and narrative viewpoint: Jonathan Raban's travels through mental spaces. Language and Literature 14 (2): 99–127.
• (2006) Guest editor of a special issue on blending of Language and Literature 15 (1).
• (2008) Personal pronouns, blending, and narrative viewpoint. In Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim and Mari Takada (eds.) Language in the context of use: Discourse and cognitive approaches to language (Cognitive Linguistics Research 37). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 167-182.
• (2008) The text and the story: levels of blending in fictional narratives. In Todd Oakley and Anders Hougaard (eds.) Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 170). Amsterdam: Benjamins. 51-78.

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