Full Title: International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA)- Panel 'Exploring data (and methodologies) in pragmatics: What can we learn or not learn from them?'

Date: 22-Jun-2025 - 27-Jun-2025
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Contact Person: Yoshi Ono
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://pragmatics.international/page/Brisbane2025

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Language Documentation; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

As discussed in Jucker et al. (2018) and Culpeper and Gillings (2019), and as evidenced by many talks given at the IPrA conferences, pragmatics, the study of language use, examines a variety of language materials. These include not only what is considered actual language use, such as written language, online and digital language, sign language, and speech and/or non-verbal behavior in naturally occurring situations, but also what would be considered less than actual use, such as constructed and elicited examples, experimental data, questionnaire/survey data, and writing and speech/behavior solicited for research.

This panel brings together researchers from representative areas of pragmatics to review the types of language materials they use as their primary data and discuss the motivations behind the selection. We hope to grasp the nature of available and commonly used data types, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses and what we can and cannot learn from them. We will explore the possibility of using multiple data types (and methodologies) to better understand language use and, in fact, language itself.

Our questions include:

What are the motivations behind selecting particular data types?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of various data types?
What can we learn or not learn from particular data types?

In trying to answer these questions, we will discuss the methodologies tied to particular data types. This panel will thus be a public forum where researchers with various theoretical persuasions review and perhaps extend the views presented by Jucker (2018), Schneider (2018), and others.

We have so far secured the participation of several researchers from corpus linguistics, interactional linguistics, usage-based linguistics, and language documentation. We solicit participation by researchers from various areas of pragmatics to create a well-rounded panel that will make it possible to have a meaningful discussion of current and future data in pragmatics. We hope to make the panel as cross-linguistic as it can be.

The panel will create an excellent opportunity for researchers, especially those relatively new to pragmatics, to reflect on the data types they use and those they don't and perhaps to consider using new data types in their studies. This exercise seems critical because we feel that, regardless of the increasing and decreasing trends in using different types of data (Culpeper and Gillings 2019), we can reach a more comprehensive understanding of language use only by utilizing multiple data types and methodologies (Jucker 2018:27). Minimally, the panel allows us to appreciate 1) the data types we have not had a chance to examine and 2) the work that examines such data.

References

Culpeper, Jonathan and Gillings, Matthew (2019) Pragmatics: Data trends. Journal of Pragmatics 145: 4-14.

Dörnyei, Zoltán (2007) Research Methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jucker, Andreas H. (2018) Data in pragmatic research. In Jucker, Andreas H. Schneider, Klaus P. and Bublitz, Wolfram. (Eds.) Methods in pragmatics: 3-36. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin.

Jucker, Andreas H., Schneider, Klaus P., Bublitz, Wolfram (Eds.), (2018) Methods in Pragmatics. Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol. 10. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin.

Schneider, Klaus P. (2018) Methods and ethics of data collection. In Jucker, Andreas H. Schneider, Klaus P. and Bublitz, Wolfram. (Eds.) Methods in pragmatics: 37-93. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin.

2nd Call for Papers:

We invite panel contributions addressing the above and related issues/questions for presentations and discussions. We will negotiate the actual form of the panel as a group to make the best use of the allotted time. If you are interested, contact us at [email protected] or [email protected].

Abstracts (min. 250 and max. 500 words) for panel contributions need to be submitted via the IPrA conference website (https://pragmatics.international/page/Brisbane2025) by 1 November 2024. Please note that IPrA membership is required for submitting an abstract and presenting at the conference. For more information, see https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2025

Panel organizers: Yoshi Ono (University of Alberta) and Natsuko
Nakagawa (Kyushu University)