Discourse traditions workshop (24/6–26/6/2021)

A positive side-effect of pandemic-related online conferences is that everyone can easily get connected from any part of the world. And so, from June 24 to 26, more than sixty guests from 15 different countries followed an invitation by Prof. Dr. Esme Winter-Froemel from the Romance linguistics department at the University of Würzburg and Prof. Dr. Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and participated in a three-day workshop entitled Old wine in new bottles? Discourse Traditions in the light of recent approaches to textual analysis and language variation. The concept of Discourse Traditions, whilst being widely referred to in contemporary Romance studies, competes with other approaches in international linguistic research that focus on text structure and discourse phenomena, e.g. corpus linguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis and computational approaches. The workshop aimed to discuss the contributions of these different approaches and frameworks, as well as to explore new perspectives for research on discourse traditions. The participants engaged in a packed programme of various talks on the subject followed by intense discussions. The papers presented at the highly successful and productive workshop will be published in the "Manual of Discourse Traditions in Romance", edited by Esme Winter-Froemel and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, to be included in the renowned series of the Manuals of Romance Linguistics at De Gruyter.   (Lukas Eisend)