36.2866, Calls: Text & Talk - "Special Issue: Communicative Practices and Genre Developments in Letter Writing" (Jrnl)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2866. Thu Sep 25 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2866, Calls: Text & Talk - "Special Issue: Communicative Practices and Genre Developments in Letter Writing" (Jrnl)

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Date: 24-Sep-2025
From: Lisa Lehnen [lisa.lehnen at uni-wuerzburg.de]
Subject: Text & Talk - "Special Issue: Communicative Practices and Genre Developments in Letter Writing" (Jrnl)


Journal: Text & Talk
Issue: Special Issue: Communicative Practices and Genre Developments
in Letter Writing
Call Deadline: 15-Oct-2025

Editors:
Lisa Lehnen (JMU Würzburg, lisa.lehnen at uni-wuerzburg.de)
Theresa Neumaier (TU Dortmund, University,
theresa.neumaier at tu-dortmund.de)
Ninja Schulz (JMU Würzburg, ninja.schulz at uni-wuerzburg.de)
Correspondence provides a rich data source for studies in historical
sociolinguistics, genre analysis, language variation and change.
However, to fully exploit the potential of the data, it is important
to be aware of external factors relevant for their production and
acknowledge the options and limitations for deriving such
metainformation. Socio-historical, cultural and technical aspects,
e.g. the socio-demographic background of the writer, societal
structure, communication purpose, and the production circumstances,
need to be understood to enable a comprehensive linguistic analysis
and valid interpretation.
While written genres are often regulated by institutions or public
players, this is not necessarily the case for correspondence, where a
less clearly defined group of individuals produces texts and engages
in establishing norms. As not all language users have access to the
same models of correspondence, conventions for new sub-genres emerging
from changing communicative needs must be established first.
Furthermore, the socio-pragmatic function of letters makes them
especially sensitive to cultural norms regarding, for instance,
politeness, stance-taking, and expressions of deference, which will
affect the conventions emerging in different cultural and
socio-political settings. Although specific grammatical features or
discourse-pragmatic units, e.g. modal verbs and requests, can be
easily located and formally analysed in different types of datasets,
interpreting their use and function requires a clear conception of
their embedding in the respective context. Similarities and
differences in the occurrence of these features may thus be imposed by
conventions established within the (sub)genre at large but also on the
level of the speech community, specific social networks, or even the
individual. And finally, technological developments have changed
letter writing considerably over the centuries, including changes in
the mode of production, means of transport, and services, all leading
to an increasingly reduced time lag between sending and receiving
letters and the expansion of the group of people participating in the
practice of producing correspondence.
In the special issue, we aim at bringing together researchers who
explore correspondence from a diachronic perspective. We invite
contributions from scholars working in fields such as discourse
analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics,
multimodality, genre analysis, and historical linguistics. Questions
we would like to address include, but are not limited to:
 - Conventionalisation: What language practices have become typical in
correspondence over time? To what extent are these sensitive to
cultural setting, politeness norms/conventions, influences from other
media etc.?
 - Specialisation: What (sub)genres of correspondence have emerged? To
what extent has the genre diversified? What influences between
specialised subgenres and beyond genre boundaries can be identified?
 - Institutionalisation: What role does correspondence have in
different domains? Which practices have become part of institutional
discourse on correspondence? Which groups have been included in and
excluded from these practices and discourses over time?
We invite research on correspondence in all languages and varieties,
particularly those that have often been neglected by previous
research.
Proposed Timeline:
15 October: Expression of interest with working title and short (1-2
sentences) description of own contribution
30 November: Deadline for full abstracts (2-3 pages)
1 May: Deadline for full papers

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Pragmatics
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics




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