“Communicative Practices and Genre Developments in Letter Writing”

Text & Talk, 15 octobre 2025

Calendrier :
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

 

Éditeurs :
Lisa Lehnen (JMU Würzburg, lisa.lehnen@uni-wuerzburg.de)
Theresa Neumaier (TU Dortmund, University, theresa.neumaier@tu-dortmund.de)
Ninja Schulz (JMU Würzburg, ninja.schulz@uni-wuerzburg.de)

 

Argument :
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.