Conference | Workshop

Historical pragmatics and letter-writing practices

Date: Thursday 16 April 2026
Time: 13:30 - 18:00 hour
Address: Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Room: 0.01

The medium of letter-writing has in past decades proven a rich source for historical pragmatic analysis. Epistolary texts, which come in many different subgenres, provide some of the most immediate, oral-like language we have at our disposal in historical linguistics. Pragmatic approaches to letters can yield fascinating insights into the social dynamics, power relations, and communicative goals underlying these materials.

However, the medium of letter-writing also presents challenges for historical pragmatic analysis. Many pragmatic models are designed around present-day contexts, and applying them to historical data, particularly letters, often necessitates careful consideration of how the characteristics of the setting, genre, and material can be accounted for within the confines of a given framework. The ScotPP project on Scottish pauper letters (corpus in development at Leiden University) illustrates this problem well: these letters exhibit structural, contextual, and social dimensions that present-day pragmatic frameworks do not account for. Factors such as hierarchy, deference, formulaicity, and strictly defined stylistic constraints within the subgenre, require us to rethink how we apply pragmatic frameworks that were not (or not sufficiently) built to account for such features.

The aim of this workshop is to explore how pragmatic frameworks might be refined or reconceptualized to better accommodate historical data, diverse letter-writing genres, and varied sociohistorical contexts. The workshop will bring together both experts and younger researchers of historical pragmatics, who will share challenges, best practices, and ideas on how to deal with the challenges of applying a pragmatic lens to historical letters. The workshop will conclude with a roundtable discussion of the presented ideas, and prospects for modifying pragmatic frameworks to withstand more variation in historical data.

Guest speakers:

Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield)
Christine Elsweiler (University of Innsbruck)
Laura Fischlhammer (University of Salzburg)

Programme

13:30-15:30: speaker presentations
15:30-15:45: coffee break
15:45-16:45: roundtable discussion
16:45-17:00: concluding remarks
17:00-18:00: borrel

Registration

Are you interested in attending?