Keynote Speakers
© România 2024

Keynote Speakers

 

Dr István Kécskes

      

 

     ISTVAN KECSKES is Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York System, USA. He teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany. Professor Kecskes is the President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and the CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) Association. He is the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism, and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium.
His book “Foreign language and mother tongue” co-authored by Tunde Papp and published by Erlbaum in 2000 was the first book that described the effect of the second language on the first language based on a longitudinal research. Dr. Kecskes’ book “Intercultural Pragmatics” published by Oxford University Press in 2013 is considered a groundbreaking monograph that shapes research in the field. His latest book is “Explorations in Chinese as a Second Language” published by Springer in 2017. Currently he is working on a new book titled “English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatic perspective” to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Dr. Kecskes is the founding editor of the linguistics journal Intercultural Pragmatics and the Mouton Series in Pragmatics published by Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin/New York, as well as the bilingual (Chinese-English) journal CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) published by Mouton and the co-founding editor of “Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict” published by John Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia (co-founder Pilar Garces Blitvich). He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier), Pragmatics & Society (Benjamins), Lingua (Elsevier), International Journal of Multilingualism (Taylor & Francis), Language & Dialogue (Benjamins), Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (De Gruyter), Corpus Pragmatics (Springer), International Journal of Language and Culture (Benjamins), the Journal of East Asian Pragmatics (Equinox), BELLS Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, Vestnik (Linguistika) Universitat Druzba Narodov, Moscow (ВЕСТНИК Российского университета дружбы народов. ЛИНГВИСТИКА), the Journal of Foreign Languages (Waiguoyu) and the journal Xiandai Waiyu published in China. Dr. Kecskes is also on the editorial board of four book series: Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology (Springer), Series in Pragmatics (Cambridge Scholarly Publishing), Pragmatic Interfaces (Equinox), and Studies in General Linguistics (Hungarian Academy of Sciences).
Dr. Kecskes received a Senior Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in the Rockefeller Research Center in Bellagio, Italy in 2004, a Senior Fellowship from the Mitteleuropa Foundation, Bolzano, Italy in 2005, a Honorary Professorship from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou in 2009, a Yunshan Chair Professorship from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China in 2011, a Distinguished Visiting Professorship from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2013 and from the University of Messina in 2017. He was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award of State University of New York in 2014.
       
       

Dr. Ștefan Oltean 

    

 
     

ȘTEFAN OLTEAN is Professor of Anglo-American Linguistics, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. His research has focused on the structure of the sentence, on free indirect discourse, on proper names, fictional names, and multilingualism, for the analysis of which he has used generative, semantic and pragmatic frameworks. Profesor Oltean was chairperson of the English Department of Babes-Bolyai University (2012-2015), dean of the Faculty of Letters (2000-2004) and vice-rector of Babes-Bolyai University (2004-2006).

He was Visiting Professor at Kent State University Kent, Ohio (1984-1986), and Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1990-1992). He is currently president of the Commission for Humanities and Theology, the Romanian Quality Insurance Agency for Higher Education (ARACIS). He was member of the board of the European Language Council (ELC/CEL) (2006-2014).

He was editor of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia (2000-2004), and is member of the advisory board of Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Bucharest, and British and American Studies, University of Timișoara. He published books and articles in stylistics, discourse analysis, narrative poetics and semantics. They include Topics in the Semantics of Names and Discourse, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărții de Știință, 2015; Introducere în semantica referenţială [“An Introduction to Referential Semantics”], Cluj-Napoca, Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2006; Lumile posibile în structurile limbajului [“Possible Worlds for Linguistics”], Cluj-Napoca, Echinox, 2003 (books); and “A Survey of the Pragmatic and Referential Functions of Free Indirect Discourse”, Poetics Today, Vol. 14: 4, Duke University Press, 1993, 691-714; “Free Indirect Discourse: Some Referential Aspects”, Journal of Literary Semantics. An international review XXIV/1, Julius Groos Verlag, 1995, 21-41; “On the bivocal nature of free indirect discourse”, Journal of Literary Semantics. An international review, 32, Mouton de Gruyter, 2003, 167-176; “On the semantics of fictional names”, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, LVIII, 4, 371–382, Romanian Academy Press, 2013 (articles).