Linguistica Coseriana IX: Cluj-Napoca, Linguistic and Poetic Creativity 21-22 February 2025
We are pleased to announce the 9th international conference on Eugenio Coseriu’s theory, Linguistica Coseriana IX: Linguistic and Poetic Creativity. This event resumes the series of international scientific meetings initiated in 2007 and organized under the general heading Linguistica Coseriana: Aix en Provence – 2007; Cluj-Napoca – 2009, Almería – 2011, Udine – 2013, Potsdam – 2015, Lima – 2017; Cádiz – 2020, and Zürich – 2021. In all these years, various other congresses and symposia have also hosted sections or panels related to Coseriu’s theory. After a 4-year gap caused mainly by Covid-19-related restrictions and their aftermath, we believe restarting the in-person meetings focused on Coserian linguistics is crucial. These meetings aim to provide a forum for open and constructive debate on the future of Coserian studies, exploring new ways of dissemination and new developments that may engage future generations of linguists, philosophers, and cultural studies specialists. Marked by the launch of this new stage in Cluj-Napoca, the conference programme will include a round-up discussion to establish a midterm route plan for the following biennial events in the series. We hope to have these events held in various locations, reviving previous networks, forging new academic connections, and engaging wider scholarly audiences.
Eugenio Coseriu
(1971/1977), “Los universales del lenguaje (y los otros)” (1974/1978), “Acerca del sentido de la enseñanza de la lengua y literatura” (1987), and “Principiile lingvisticii ca ştiinţă a culturii” (1992). Aside from his many papers specifically dedicated to it, the problem of creativity penetrates the deepest tissues of Coseriu’s contributions to linguistics, as well as to the theory and philosophy of language. This comes as a natural development, since for Coseriu, just like for Humboldt before him, poetry (and literature in general) neither represents a deviation from, nor stands in opposition to “plain” language and our day-to-day activity of speaking. On the contrary, it is in poetry that the creative essence and the entire potentiality of language are best fulfilled.
We welcome proposals that may approach Coseriu's views on linguistic and poetic creativity from various perspectives (disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary). Theoretical proposals developed by other researchers, based on Coseriu’s conceptual framework, will also be gladly received.
The conference will be held in-person, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Each presentation will be assigned 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
- creativity as an essential universal of language: philosophical and epistemological perspectives;
- creativity on the level of historical languages: strategies and functions of lexical and grammatical innovation within one language, or across several languages;
- mechanisms of creativity on the level of discourse: possible connections with the categorization of text types and genres;
- evocative sign relations in poetic texts, as compared to other types and modes of discourse;
- sublation (Aufhebung) of incongruence and incorrectness through adequacy as a strategy of textual sense construction;
- creativity and metaphor: the creative nature of metaphorical process at the universal level;
- historic-cultural creativity of metaphor at the level of historical language;
- metaphor creativity at the level of discourse;
- metaphorical creativity in poetic texts;
- specialized terminologies: creation of new terms, interlingual shifts, comparison of innovative strategies across diverse domains and disciplines;
- Coseriu’s conceptual framework in the context of present-day linguistics;
- the relevance of Coseriu’s theoretical framework and conceptual distinctions in the current debate on artificial intelligence.
The working languages of the conference are English, Spanish, Italian, French and Romanian. Abstracts of 200-250 words plus selected references should be submitted in the language intended for the presentation. A selection of papers will be published in a peer-reviewed volume.
Book of Abstracts 
31 Horea Street, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
