Historical Pragmatics Workshop at ICEHL 12

Sat Feb 16 14:29:45 UTC 2002

Call for papers for the Workshop on Historical Pragmatics at ICEHL 12

Susan Fitzmaurice, Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen
Glasgow, August 21-26, 2002.

Abstracts for contributions to the workshop must be submitted before March 31,
2002

Background
In her plenary address to the first meeting of the conference on Studies in the
History of the English Language (SHEL-1) at UCLA in May 2000, Elizabeth
Traugott drew particular attention to the changes in methodologies and
approaches used to study the history of the English language over the past
century. Her talk was entitled, ‘From Etymology to historical pragmatics’, a
title that recalls Eve Sweetser’s (1990) book, From Etymology to Pragmatics at
the same time as inserting the historical into Pragmatics. On one local level,
she demonstrated the extent to which processes of grammaticalization might be
approached as semantic-pragmatic processes. On another more general level, she
indicated the extent to which the new field of historical pragmatics promises
to provide the source of more nuanced, fine-grained kinds of explanation for
linguistic changes than have traditionally been offered. She also set a number
of challenges and tasks for those working in English studies and the history of
the English language; tasks that involve venturing across usual disciplinary
and sub-disciplinary boundaries within English studies. Such challenges provide
the context for the workshop at ICEHL 12 on historical pragmatics, which will
focus on discourse features, stylistics or genre description. 

The aim of the workshop on Historical Pragmatics is to provide a setting in
which participants begin to address some challenges posed by the work on the
history of the English language that identifies itself as historical pragmatic
in approach. The range of work that falls within the parameters of pragmatics
has begun to exert considerable pressure on the designator ‘pragmatic’, to the
extent that workers in the field really need to search for fresh terminology to
convey a better sense of the more fine-grained analysis actually being
conducted (Fitzmaurice, 2000). 

It seems timely to use this pressure as occasion for collective investigation
in the forum of a research workshop. To this end, participants in the workshop
may assess the body of research conducted on the history of the English
language within what we might loosely identify as the framework of historical
pragmatics. At the same time, it will provide the opportunity to explore some
topics and questions of common interest to fields outside historical
pragmatics. Increasingly, these questions have to do with the ways in which we
approach the analysis of historical discourses, discourses that have their own
cultural settings, historical codes, circumstances of production and
transmission, and attendant language practices. The questions raised concern
the ways in which we identify, read and account for rhetorical functions such
as information, explication, persuasion, strategic interaction, and rhetorical
force. 

Approaches that share the domain of historical discourse as a field of enquiry
are historical stylistics, corpus linguistics and historical sociolinguistics.
The concerns of historical pragmatics also overlap with those of disciplines
that now lie outside the domain of language and linguistics studies, like
rhetoric and literary history. This workshop will provide a forum for examining
how the connections among such approaches or perspectives to some of the issues
outlined above may be mutually enriching 

References:
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2000. ‘Some remarks on the rhetoric of historical
pragmatics’. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1):1-6.
Sweetser, Eve V. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural
Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2000. ‘From etymology to historical pragmatics’. Plenary
paper, presented at the conference on Studies in English Historical
Linguistics, UCLA, May 27th, 2000.
http://www.stanford.edu/~traugott/ect-papersonline.html

Format of workshop
The nature of the format and the associated procedures for the workshop are
designed to ensure that scholars who have not hitherto considered their work
relevant to historical pragmatics and those who may be new to the field have
the opportunity to share their work with each other and with scholars who may
be more well-established figures in the field. 

We invite scholars to submit proposals for papers that consider key topics and
questions in the history of the English language from a perspective in English
historical linguistics that chimes with or indeed competes with an account from
the perspective of historical pragmatics, for example, studies in the role of
politeness theory in the pragmatic (re)construction of meaning in letters
between mistresses and servants in early modern English.

Abstracts for contributions to the workshop may be submitted before March 31,
2002, to Susan Fitzmaurice. Two weeks after the deadline participants will be
informed whether their paper has been accepted for the workshop, and the
abstracts will be distributed among the participants. To ensure as much early
collaboration as possible, participants are invited to send each other comments
and suggestions through email; this way it should be possible to set up a
discussion of topics relevant to the main subject of the workshop well
beforehand. At the same time, participants will be requested to send titles of
relevant publications to Susan Fitzmaurice, who will compile a bibliography and
provide regular updates of this bibliography for mutual benefit by the workshop
participants. Papers (max. length 15pp., line space 1.5) should be distributed
among the participants before July 20, 2002, so that they can all be read in
the month before the conference workshop. 

For discussion during the workshop, each author will be asked to compile a list
of topics/questions for discussion based on one of the other papers submitted.
These topics/questions will be collected by the first organizer and distributed
well before the conference. During the workshop, the topics will be the focus
of the discussion, which will be conducted against the background of the papers
submitted and read by all participants.

Organizers:

Susan Fitzmaurice
Department of English, Box 6032
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-6032
USA
T: (001) 928 523-9649, F: (001) 928 523-7074
Email: susan.fitzmaurice at nau.edu

Andreas H. Jucker
Justus Liebig University
Department of English
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10
D-35394 Giessen, Germany
T: (49) 641/99 30150, F: (49) 641/99 30159
Email: Andreas.Jucker at anglistik.uni-giessen.de

Irma Taavitsainen
Department of English
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 3)
00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
T: (358)9 19123516 F: (358)9 19123072
Email: Irma.Taavitsainen at Helsinki.FI

Susan M. Fitzmaurice
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
English Department, Box 6032
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-6032
tel: (520) 523-9649
fax: (520) 523-7074 

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