I attended the IPrA conference in Göteborg (which - I have recently found out - is actually pronounced “yötebori” or something like that…), Sweden, from the 9th to the 13th of July.

The conference itself was very interesting: there were many different parallel panels and lecture sessions and more than 1000 participants (so I hear), so it was difficult to attend all the talks that I was interested in.

I gave two talks, one on Tuesday in a lecture session and one on Friday in the panel on lexical contrast in discourse organized by Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis and Caroline Willners. They were exquisite convenors, the panel members were very nice and their presentations were extremely interesting. And the panel dinner at the restaurant Sjöbaren was very pleasant!

The experience as a speaker at such a large conference was interesting and very useful, even though harder than anything else I had done before.

I tried to attend all the presentations which involved verbs of cognitive attitude in one way or another, but in the end it was not always possible as the biggest flaw in the organization was that most panels and lecture sessions on similar topics where at the same time! I suppose that it was difficult to plan such a big event, but still, I would have liked to have the possibility to attend more sessions than the ones that I actually had the chance to see.

I really liked both Juliane House’s work on “you know” and the presentations of Kasia Jaszczolt. I also enjoyed the discussions of the work on movie English carried out at the University of Pavia, and the work on prosody and epistemic parentheticals by Nicole Dehé.

The IPrA conference was also a great opportunity for me to see what is going on these days as far as research in epistemic modality is concerned. I got in touch with Elise Kärkkäinen who presented an interesting work on “I guess”.

Now the personal… we did a home swap! We were very lucky in that the apartment that we ended up in was great, really. In an excellent position on the Masthugget hill, halfway between the city centre and the University. So nice!

It was really a good experience that allowed us to stay for 8 days in Göteborg without spending too much. Plus, it is so much nicer to have a whole apartment than just a hotel room!

Too bad (or too good, because I had to be inside most of the time…) the weather was rainy all week. Except for the only afternoon when I was free actually, so I guess that turned out just fine.

We found the home exchange on one of the many portals available: International Home Exchange Network.