LSP 2022 – Shaping knowledge through language: LSP in theory and practice

23rd International Conference on Languages for Specific Purposes

The 23rd International Conference on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP 2022) will be held EXCLUSIVELY ON SITE at NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal (CAN – Colégio Almada Negreiros, 1099 – 032 Lisboa).

Under this year’s motto “Shaping knowledge through language: LSP in theory and practice”, it aims to provide a meeting and sharing point to showcase the current and most recent LSP-related theoretical and methodological perspectives, oriented towards knowledge organisation in the digital age.

This conference seeks to gather not only language specialists but also experts from multiple areas and activities, whose methods of organising knowledge and their respective discourses in a specialised context introduce new research and/or applications that permeate the main challenges of the 21st century.

These challenges involve, on the one hand, resorting to the appropriate discourse according to the – previously defined and segmented – target audience and, on the other hand, also bringing citizens into the debate, offering them the means to access reliable, useful, and reusable information. The complexity increases when communication becomes multilingual, multicultural, and when the areas of knowledge are transdisciplinary.

In a multilingual, multicultural, and digital world, LSP play a crucial role as vehicles of specialised information in a wide range of communication contexts. Intended to be applied in various professional areas – communication, education, translation, among others -, LSP are not only complex in conceptual terms but they can also be terminologically unstable, which, in turn, has consequences for knowledge sharing.

The exploration of the proposed theme may follow a theoretical and/or methodological path in various fields of application, from organising and representing knowledge for linguistic purposes to specialised communication and translation. Monitoring, observation, and/or evaluation processes of the collected linguistic data will also be relevant, with the aim of creating linguistic and/or didactic resources.

On the other hand, efficiency in communication is directly dependent on the adequacy of the discourse to the target audience, who may or may not comprise specialists. This fact leads us to think and rethink the processes of popularisation and linguistic mediation: (i) what are the needs of the target audience? (ii) what methods can be used to collect and learn about the efficiency of the communication process? (iii) how does one negotiate and co-create with the audience, taking up the challenge of co-constructing knowledge? (iv) finally, how can LSP adapt to new forms of digital communication, especially taking into account the ongoing demands of digital transition?

Any of these approaches offers a wide range of opportunities for innovative research that responds to current challenges regarding knowledge sharing and, in addition, aimed at meeting the needs and expectations of citizens in general in what concerns the relevance and clarity of communication, which necessarily requires the development of new methodological practices in LSP.


The working languages of the conference are English, French, Portuguese and Spanish but all speakers are kindly requested to provide slides in English.


Program (download here)

Book of Abstracts (download here)

Website: https://lsp.fcsh.unl.pt/en/welcome/