International Pragmatics Association

Last updated
International Pragmatics Association
International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
AbbreviationIPrA
Formation1986;38 years ago (1986)
Founder Jef Verschueren
Founded at Antwerp, Belgium
Type Nonprofit
Legal statusInternational academic not-for-profit organization
PurposeStudy of language use
Fields Pragmatics
Linguistics
Key people
Stephen Levinson (Outgoing President), Marina Sbisà (President), Michael Haugh (Incoming President), Jan-Ola Östman (Treasurer), Ann Verhaert (Executive Secretary), Helmut Gruber (Editor-in-Chief), Yoshiko Matsumoto, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, Salvador Pons Bordería, Gunter Senft, Mieke Vandenbroucke
PublicationPragmatics
Handbook of Pragmatics
Bibliography of Pragmatics
Website https://pragmatics.international/

The International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) is a scientific organization that focuses on the study of language use. It was established as a non-profit organization in 1986. [1]

Contents

IPrA represents the interdisciplinary field of pragmatics, offering a functional perspective on language and communication from cognitive, social, and cultural viewpoints.

Publications

IPrA has made contributions to pragmatics through conferences, handbooks, and its journal. It publishes the quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal Pragmatics , with Helmut Gruber serving as the Editor-in-Chief. [2] Additionally, the Association maintains the annually updated Handbook of Pragmatics [3] with Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren as its Founding Editors, and an online, freely accessible Bibliography of Pragmatics. [4]

History

In 1986, IPrA was established as a not-for-profit organization in Antwerp, Belgium. [5] The idea on which its establishment was based dates back to 1979 when Herman Parret enlisted Marina Sbisà and Verschueren to co-organize a conference on "Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics" in Urbino, Italy. [6] Another key event was the 1984 workshop "Between semantics and pragmatics," co-organized by Johan van der Auwera and Svenka Savić in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, which laid the foundation for the 1985 "International Pragmatics Conference" in Viareggio, Italy, co-organized by Marcella Bertuccelli Papi and Verschueren. [7] The success of this conference confirmed the belief that pragmatics provided a mobilizing idea for collaborative and trans-disciplinary research relevant for addressing problems of human communication, forming the basis for the association's establishment. In the same year, the Consultation Board was formed, and John Gumperz agreed to act as IPrA's first President. In early 1986, the Association was officially set up with its seat in Antwerp, Belgium. [8]

Presidents

Conferences

IPrA has organized eighteen International Pragmatics Conferences, [9] which are held biennially. [10]

Its educational and outreach efforts consist of a mentoring program designed for young scholars, introductory pragmatics courses offered in different languages, and an archive featuring pioneers and leading voices in the field of pragmatics. [26]

Related Research Articles

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linguistic Society of America</span> Learned society in the US

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: Language, the open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics, and the open access journal Phonological Data & Analysis. Its annual meetings, held every winter, foster discussion amongst its members through the presentation of peer-reviewed research, as well as conducting official business of the society. Since 1928, the LSA has offered training to linguists through courses held at its biennial Linguistic Institutes held in the summer. The LSA and its 3,600 members work to raise awareness of linguistic issues with the public and contribute to policy debates on issues including bilingual education and the preservation of endangered languages.

Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Wolfgang U. Dressler is an Austrian professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna. Dressler is a polyglot and scholar who has contributed to various fields of linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, text linguistics, clinical linguistics and child language development. He is an important representative of the 'naturalness theory'.

Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.

Salvatore Attardo is a full professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce and was the editor-in-chief of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies from 2002 to 2011. He studied at Purdue University under Victor Raskin and extended Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor (SSTH) into the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH). He publishes in the field of humor in literature and is considered to be one of the top authorities in the area. He is also the author of Humor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor published by Anthem Press in 2023.

Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.

Cliff Goddard is a professor of linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is, with Anna Wierzbicka, a leading proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic analysis. Goddard's research has explored cognitive and cultural aspects of everyday language and language use. He is considered a leading scholar in the fields of semantics and cross-cultural pragmatics. His work spans English, indigenous Australian languages, and South East Asian languages.

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neal R. Norrick</span>

Neal R. Norrick held the chair of English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he established a linguistics curriculum firmly based in pragmatics and discourse analysis. In the last two decades, he has become an important personality in linguistic pragmatics for his pioneering works on humor and narrative in conversational interaction.

Susan Catherine Herring is an American linguist and communication scholar who researches gender differences in Internet use, and the characteristics, functions, and emergent norms associated with language, communication, and behavior in new online forms such as social media. She is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, where she founded and directs the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication. In 2013 she received the Association for Information Science & Technology Research Award for her contributions to the field of computer-mediated communication. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Herring also founded and directed the BROG project.

In linguistics, functional sentence perspective (FSP) is a theory describing the information structure of the sentence and language communication in general. It has been developed in the tradition of the Prague School of Functional and Structural Linguistics together with its sister theory, Topic-Focus Articulation.

The International Association of Applied Linguistics, or AILA, was formed in 1964 as an association of various national organizations for applied linguistics. AILA has more than 8,000 members in more than 35 different applied linguistics associations around the world. AILA continues to grow, working with existing and emerging regional networks, such as AILA East Asia, AILA Europe, AILA Arabia, and AILA Latin America. Its most high-profile activity is the World Congress of Applied Linguistics, which takes place once every three years. It also has two publications, AILA News, a newsletter, and the AILA Review, an academic journal.

Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.

Joachim Leilich is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp, of German origin, who formerly held positions as a tutor and student-assistant at the university of Frankfurt. His main research topics are analytical philosophy, phenomenal consciousness, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and freedom of the will. He obtained his PhD under supervision of Karl-Otto Apel in Frankfurt.

Laura Miller is an American anthropologist and the Ei'ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She held various academic positions and jobs in both the United States and Japan before accepting this named chair in 2010.

Jef Verschueren is a Belgian linguist, academic, and author. He is an emeritus professor of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp.

References

  1. Brown, Andy (September 5, 2023). "K Faculty Present at Global Pragmatics Seminar".
  2. "Helmut Gruber". linguistik.univie.ac.at.
  3. "LINGUIST List 13.2066: Handbook of Pragmatics: Verschueren et al". The LINGUIST List. August 11, 2002.
  4. "Bibliography of Pragmatics Online". rena.mpdl.mpg.de.
  5. "International Pragmatics Association". MERLOT.
  6. Parret, Herman; Sbisà, Marina, eds. (November 20, 1981). "Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics: proceedings of the Conference on Pragmatics, Urbino, July 8-14, 1979". Benjamins via K10plus ISBN.
  7. "The Pragmatic Perspective : Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference | WorldCat.org".
  8. "International Organizations Search | Union of International Associations". uia.org.
  9. "18th International Pragmatics Conference, Brussels, 9-14 luglio 2023, call for papers". www.aitla.it.
  10. "IPrA Conferences | Grammar and Pragmatics | University of Antwerp". www.uantwerpen.be.
  11. "6th International Pragmatics Conference - IPrA 1998 - Leuphana Universität Lüneburg". fox.leuphana.de.
  12. Brisard, Frank, ed. (November 20, 2002). "Grounding: the epistemic footing of deixis and reference". M. de Gruyter via Library Catalog (Blacklight).
  13. "Japan Association for Language Teaching" (PDF).
  14. "9th International Pragmatics Conference (Riva del Garda, 10-15 luglio 2005)". accademiadellacrusca.it.
  15. "News: News: Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering: Indiana University Bloomington". luddy.indiana.edu.
  16. "11th International Pragmatics Conference | ACL Member Portal". www.aclweb.org.
  17. "12th International Pragmatics Conference". the Research Portal - University of Namur.
  18. "13th International Pragmatics Conference". Research Explorer The University of Manchester.
  19. "14th IPrA Conference Presentation". Birkbeck, University of London. November 3, 2015.
  20. "IprA 2015 (2): International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference, Antwerp, July 2015". August 15, 2015.
  21. "15th International Pragmatics Conference | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org.
  22. "Guest blogs: Reflections on IPrA 2017, Belfast (Part 1)". July 29, 2017.
  23. "16th International Pragmatics Conference | Events | News and Events". Department of English and Communication.
  24. "IPrA Conference". ZHAW Applied Linguistics.
  25. "18th International Pragmatics Conference | Portal del Hispanismo". hispanismo.cervantes.es.
  26. "Gumperz | The Language Archive". archive.mpi.nl.