Language use across time:
what you didn’t know you’ve always wanted to know about historical pragmatics
“If you do not know where you come from, you will always be a child”, wrote Cicero. And indeed, not knowing where one comes from, in the family or society at large, means being unable to understand oneself or how the world works. This is because a person’s contextualised history is the fabric and substance of her/his identity, through which she/he can fully act in the world. Knowing one’s history is therefore key to self-awareness and self-empowerment.
The diachronic evolution of languages is a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness, given that it is mainly through language that we develop social interactions, build relationships and project our identities. The account of this evolution, technically called historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language – changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax – that is on language as a grammatical system. More recently, however, attention has broadened to include functional aspects of language use – e.g. strategies and conventions of communicative practices over time – which has given rise to the field of historical pragmatics.
Historical pragmatics encompasses three main areas – language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics) – and requires the empirical investigation of actual language use within communicative and social contexts. Each of the above domains offers complementary insights into the workings of communicative practices over time, and thus helps us understand why our current communicative practices are the way they are.
The Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Padua (www.disll.unipd.it) is organising a conference entitled “Language use across time: what you didn’t know you’ve always wanted to know about historical pragmatics” to be held in Padua on February 16-17, 2018.
The aim of the conference is to bring together historical linguists and pragmaticians interested in exploring diachronic communicative practices within and across languages with a view to shedding light on, among other things: how present-day communicative practices have been informed and shaped by earlier communicative options, constraints, goals and needs; to what extent and in what ways present communicative practices differ from earlier communicative practices; how past communicative practices differed across social groups.
We welcome contributions relevant, but not limited, to the following topics:
Comparative-contrastive historical pragmatics
Research methods in historical pragmatics
Corpus-informed approaches to historical pragmatics
Challenges of historical pragmatics
Variational historical pragmatics
Evolution of discursive practices in given genres
Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspects of earlier communicative practices
Conventions of means and conventions of forms in speech acts in different time periods
Temporal relativity of appropriateness of forms and practices
Reasons for changes in the understanding of politeness and impoliteness
Reasons for changes in the encoding of pragmatic behaviour
Pragmatic features of earlier texts as clues to understanding present-day interactional practices
Social deixis in different time periods
Metapragmatic descriptions in texts from different time periods
Lexico-grammatical reflexes of changes in interactional practices over time
If interested in participating, we invite you to submit an abstract for consideration, following this template and a separate file with your personal details, as specified here . Send the two files with your abstract and personal details in Word format as email attachments to sara.gesuato@unipd.it and cecilia.poletto@unipd.it, writing “Historical Pragmatics Conference Abstract” in your subject heading. The submission deadline is 15 September 2017. You may submit a maximum of two abstracts if at least one of these is co-authored.
Each abstract will be reviewed anonymously and assessed along the following criteria:
A- discusses a topic relevant to the theme of the conference
B- indicates the specific topic addressed
C- has a clear sense of purpose
D- appears to be theoretically motivated
E- specifies the amount, type and source of the data analysed
F- outlines the research method adopted
G- motivates the choice of the research method adopted
H- presents actual findings, including preliminary findings, rather than merely anticipated findings
I- draws conclusions from the findings
J- is well-structured and reads well
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by early November 2017.
We are looking forward to seeing you in Padua!
Sara Gesuato
Cecilia Poletto
Conference organisers