Pre-conference workshops at ICAME 46 – additional call for abstracts for participation:

Workshop 1: "Speech Acts in Formal and Informal Interactions in English: Mapping the Past, Exploring the Future"
Co-organisers: Rachele De Felice, Christine Elsweiler, and Sofia Rüdiger

In this workshop, we aim to tackle the issue of comparability of corpus-based speech act research. Our discussions will be informed by three key research questions:

1. How can we make different datasets comparable?
2. How can we draw overarching conclusions from individual studies?
3. Is it possible to draw diachronic comparisons if our knowledge about communicative settings is limited?

We invite contributions on speech act use in either formal or informal interactions drawing on historical or present-day English corpus data, or both, that address the issue of comparability by focusing on methodological aspects relating to

• which data are used
• the size of datasets
• how and whether datasets are prepared or annotated
• which metadata are available
• how conventional and non-conventional speech acts are retrieved in non-annotated data.
• We are additionally interested in contributions which explicitly compare corpus-based speech act research to insights from other methodological approaches such as
• experimental studies, elicitation studies, etc.

Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words (excluding references) and should clearly state research question(s), approach, data, method, and (expected) results. Further details are in the PDF call for papers document. 

ICAME Workshop: Speech Acts in Formal and Informal Interactions

Please send your abstract to by 24 January 2025.

Workshop 2: “Conventionalisation, specialisation, institutionalisation: Exploring communicative practices and genre developments in letter writing”

Workshop convenors:

Lisa Lehnen (JMU Würzburg, )
Theresa Neumaier (TU Dortmund, University, )
Ninja Schulz (JMU Würzburg, )

In this workshop, we aim at bringing together researchers who explore correspondence from a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover the time span from Early Modern English to the 20th century exploring diverse contexts, such as health communication, threatening letters, business correspondence and pauper letters from Britain, the US and Hong Kong. Key issues 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, and influences from other media etc.?
• Specialisation: What (sub)genres have emerged (for instance business letters, threatening letters, etc.)? To what extent has the genre diversified? What influences between specialized subgenres and beyond genre boundaries can be identified?
• Institutionalisation: What role does correspondence have in different domains? Which practices have become part of institutional discourses? Which groups have been included in and excluded from these practices?

By investigating historical correspondence from and across English-speaking communities and contexts, we want to initiate a discussion about new approaches to tracing and theorising genre developments and the complexities involved therein. 

Abstracts (400-500 words, excluding references) should be sent to until 15 January 2025. All abstracts must clearly state research question(s), approach, data, method, and (expected) results.