Preliminaries

Deciding if your work ready to present (does it really have to be?)
Selecting a conference

http://www.linguistlist.org,
LSA bulletin or online at http://www.lsadc.org/
Major general conferences:

Linguistic Society of America
Modern Languages Association
Berkeley Linguistics Society
Chicago Linguistics Society
Penn Linguistics Colloquium

Targeted conferences: (e.g. Cognitive Linguistics, but consult with faculty on the subfield relevant to your research):

International Cognitive Linguistics Conference
Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language
International Conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association
Colloquia and theme sessions on metaphor, blending, etc.

Abstract preparation

What an abstract is: it’s not just a summary of your work – it’s a tantalizing description of work you have done that should be presented.
Abstracts should:

Be clear
Be concise
Be specific
Describe results (if possible).
Be relevant to general issues

Abstract content

Title. Should clearly capture what the talk is about. There is a tradition in Linguistics of cute titles. You may opt for one. Also, if you publish a lot of related work, you'll have to pick your title selectively.
First paragraph. Should identify the phenomenon to be addressed, give example or examples of it, say what the current study contributes to the understanding of it (does it contradict an existing theory, if so, exactly what about that theory does it contradict (with citations), and on what basis? Does it expand a particular theory to new phenomena? If so, on what basis, and why haven’t others noticed it?) The first paragraph should be short, like 150 words or less.
Middle. Presentation of the outline of the argument and data to be marshalled in favor of that argument. Make sure to be as specific as possible.
Last paragraph. Restate the main point of the paper and give some indications about its relevance to other aspects of linguistics, e.g. some larger theoretical question.
LSA’s example of a good and a bad abstract.: http://www.lsadc.org/web2/dec2001bltn/index.htm

Abstract formatting: Follow it to the letter. Do NOT overrun the page limit for any reason.

Abstract practice

An example of an abstract that could be (dramatically) improved

Spatial Imagery in English

Recent experimental results suggest that some aspects of the spatial domain is frequently used for reasoning about time. However, they do not imply that langage understanders conscript spatial imagery to process metaphorical language based on space – it could for example simply be some propositional aspect of the space domain that is used to reason about time. Concluding from these results that language understanders make use of spacial imagery constitutes a modus tollens error. The studies reported on in this paper aimed to test this.

First, we tested whether literal up or down encoded by an intransative sentences gave a directional (facilitory) priming effect on object identification. Second, we tested whether metaphorical use of those same intransitive, height-implying verbs in sentences like The cost of pork bellies fell, and The temperature rose also yielded a facilitory priming effect. Third and finally, we tested whether use of intransative verbs that are not used to describe literal up-down motion but which belong to a target domain that is metaphorically understood as having vertical orientation (e.g. goodness, morality, fairness, quantity), which includes a larger number of verbs that is usually admitted in studies of lexical semantics that are primarily interested in concrete, or literal meaning, which unfortunately is most theories of meaning, also yields a facilitory priming effect.

If procesing literal and metaphorical motion sentences makes us of spatial imagery, then the particular spatial dimension evoked by the sentence should be the target of more covert attention. For example, a sentence encoding vertical motion like The bottle fell should result in a langage understander attending to the vertical dimension of the visual field more than the horizontal dimention. We tested this hypothesis, following Richardson et al., through an object recognition task, in which an object of varying shape appeared in the upper, lower, right, or left quadrant of a computer screen, where sujects were asked to categorize the shape of the object as quick as possible. We hypothesized that there would be an effect of sentence type on the reactions to the object stimuli.

Our results should show that while there is a main effect for direction in the literal sentences, there is none in either set of non-literal motion cases. The implications of this research will be discussed at length, in particular their relevance to language acquisition and language technologies.

An improved version:

Spatial imagery in literal and metaphorical sentence processing

Understanding literal and metaphorical motion sentences has been argued (e.g. Bergen and Chang To appear) to require a hearer to access stored mental representations of recurrent perceptual structures, known as image schemas (Johnson 1987). In several recent studies, Boroditsky (2000, 2001) has shown that vertically or horizontally oriented spatial primes influence the processing of metaphorical sentences, and that they have different effects on speakers of languages with different spatial metaphors. These results suggest that some aspect of the spatial domain is frequently used for reasoning about time. However, they do not imply that language understanders conscript spatial imagery to process metaphorical language based on space – it could for example simply be some propositional aspect of the space domain that is used to reason about time. The studies reported on in this paper aimed to test whether sentence comprehension makes use of simulated spatial imagery

If processing literal and metaphorical motion sentences makes use of spatial imagery, then the particular spatial dimension evoked by the sentence should be the target of more covert attention. For example, a sentence encoding vertical motion like The bottle fell should result in a language understander attending to the vertical dimension of the visual field more than the horizontal dimention. We tested this hypothesis, following Richardson et al (unpublished ms.), through an object recognition task, in which an object of varying shape appeared in the upper, lower, right, or left quadrant of a computer screen, where subjects were asked to categorize the shape of the object as quickly as possible. We hypothesized that being first presented with a sentence evoking literal or metaphorical upwards or downwards motion would facilitate a subject’s identification of an object in the upper or lower quadrant of the screen, respectively, relative to a baseline case where the prime sentence expressed no verticality.

First, we tested whether literal up or down encoded by an intransitive sentences yielded a directional (facilitory) priming effect on object identification, for sentences like The brick fell or The cloud rose. Second, we tested whether metaphorical use of those same intransitive, height-implying verbs in sentences like The cost of pork bellies fell, and The temperature rose also yielded a facilitory priming effect. Third and finally, we tested whether use of intransitive verbs that are not used to describe literal up-down motion but which belong to a target domain that is metaphorically understood as having vertical orientation (e.g. goodness, morality, fairness, quantity) also yields a facilitory priming effect. Examples sentences included The cost of pork bellies increased, and The temperature decreased.

Preliminary results show that while there is a main effect for direction in the literal sentences, there is none in either set of non-literal motion cases. This suggests that while spatial imagery may be an important component of the comprehension of literal motion sentences, it is not so for either metaphorical sentences making use of those same motion verbs or of abstract sentences relating to changes in quantity.