37.2458, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Narrating Inherited Trauma Across Languages and Cultures (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2458. Thu Jul 23 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2458, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Narrating Inherited Trauma Across Languages and Cultures (Finland)

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Date: 22-Jul-2026
From: Bracha Nir and Tomoko I. Sakita [bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: Narrating Inherited Trauma Across Languages and Cultures


Panel at IPC20: Narrating Inherited Trauma Across Languages and
Cultures
Short Title: IPC20 / IPrA2027 Panel
Theme: Narrating inherited trauma: Pragmatic, narrative, and
cross-cultural perspectives

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Bracha Nir
Contact Email: bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

We invite contributions to the panel "Narrating inherited trauma:
Pragmatic, narrative, and cross-cultural perspectives," to be held as
part of the 20th International Pragmatics Conference, Helsinki,
Finland, 27 June – 2 July 2027. Scholars who are considering a
contribution are welcome to contact us with a provisional title and a
brief description of the proposed paper by September 15, at:
Bracha Nir, bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il;
Tomoko I. Sakita, tsakita at mail.doshisha.ac.jp.
The panel focuses on the linguistic, pragmatic, narrative, and
interactional dimensions of inherited trauma across languages and
cultures. We are interested in how people narrate traumatic pasts that
they did not witness directly, but know through family transmission,
prior tellings, partial knowledge, public memory, archival traces, or
later reconstruction. Such narratives may concern experiences of war,
persecution, displacement, captivity, disappearance, return, or other
forms of collective violence and forced migration.
Although inherited traumatic pasts are central to public and private
discourse in many societies, they have received limited attention as a
distinct object of linguistic and pragmatic inquiry. They raise
questions that are central to pragmatics and discourse analysis. How
do speakers claim, negotiate, or limit the right to tell another
person's story? How do they calibrate certainty, source of knowledge,
evidential access, hearsay, and reconstruction? How do they display
accountability to those whose memory they preserve, especially when
those people are absent or no longer alive to confirm, contest, or
complete the account? How are affect, moral positioning,
intersubjective alignment, and narrative authority built into the
structure of such tellings?
The panel is anchored in ongoing comparative work on second-generation
Hebrew and Japanese narratives of World War II, and seeks to open a
broader conversation across languages, regions, historical contexts,
and discourse settings. We are especially interested in how speakers
make inherited traumatic pasts tellable when narrated events are
personally consequential but not experientially their own. This
problem invites connections between narrative analysis, pragmatics,
interactional linguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics,
cognitive linguistics, and related fields.
Possible topics include:
- stance-taking and narrative authority;
- epistemic positioning, evidential practices, hearsay, and
reconstruction;
- accountability toward absent others, family histories, and
present-day audiences;
- affect, evaluation, and intersubjective alignment;
- reported or constructed speech in inherited narratives;
- narrative structure and the buildup of tellability;
- intergenerational narration and family transmission;
- public testimony, commemoration, educational discourse, and digital
storytelling;
- cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison;
- methodological challenges in working with inherited, fragmented, or
partially mediated accounts.
We welcome empirical contributions based on spoken, written, digital,
multimodal, archival, interview, oral-history, family, educational,
commemorative, or public-discourse data. Contributions may focus on
World War II as well as other contexts of collective violence,
persecution, forced displacement, disappearance, captivity, or return.
We especially welcome work that combines close linguistic analysis
with broader questions about memory, responsibility, affiliation, and
the social life of narratives.
Submission Information:
Please submit your abstract, maximum 500 words, through the conference
website: https://ipra2027.exordo.com/login
The deadline is 15 October 2026, 23:59 CEST.
In step 4, "Topics," please select our panel: "Narrating inherited
trauma: Pragmatic, narrative, and cross-cultural perspectives."
Contributors are asked to flag any possible use of AI in preparing the
abstract. An active IPrA membership is required both for abstract
submission and for participation in the conference. Please note that
each person may be first author of only one conference contribution. A
person may be involved in a second or third contribution only if
someone else is the first author and will also be present at the
conference.
Further information on the submission process can be found on the
official IPC20 Call for Papers:
https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027
General information on the conference is available on the IPrA
website: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki
Again, please contact the organizers, Bracha Nir and Tomoko I. Sakita,
with any questions regarding the panel: bnir at univ.haifa.ac.il;
tsakita at mail.doshisha.ac.jp.
Selected References:
Du Bois, J. W. 2007. The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.),
Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp.
139–182). John Benjamins.
Hirsch, M. 2012. The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual
culture after the Holocaust. Columbia University Press.
Nuckolls, J. B., & Michael, L. (Eds.). 2014. Evidentiality in
interaction. John Benjamins.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. 2001. Living narrative: Creating lives in
everyday storytelling. Harvard University Press.
Schiffrin, D. 1996. Narrative as self-portrait: Sociolinguistic
constructions of identity. Language in Society, 25(2), 167–203.
Tannen, D. 1986. Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and
American conversational and literary narrative. In F. Coulmas (Ed.),
Direct and indirect speech (pp. 311–332). Mouton de Gruyter.



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