Pragmatic Diachronic Study of the 20th Century

Dear Colleagues,

Historical linguistics has traditionally focused on linguistic change over the centuries, describing the different stages of the grammaticalization of a given form. Additionally, recent works have hypothesized linguistic changes within a relatively short period (Pons and Salameh, 2024). The motivation behind this Special Issue lies in the interest in linguistic change within the 20th century, given that this era allows witnessing changes with a higher degree of granularity (Pons, 2014).

Despite the proximity of this period to the present, various phenomena have taken place in the last century, such as the colloquialization of radio/television broadcasting (Salameh, 2023) or the addressing vocatives among older and younger generations (Pons and Llopis, 2020). These phenomena provide insights into pragmatic changes and offer additional information about how social and cultural innovations become reflected in the historical development of a language. The current state of the art in the literature has primarily addressed diachronic–pragmatic change in Spanish; accordingly, we aim to fill this gap by expanding this line of research to other languages. Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Pragmatic changes in discourse forms, such as conversational formulas, discourse markers, or formulation and text-structuring devices.
• Changes in spoken registers among media and political discourse.
• Changes in written texts (such as letters or journal articles).
• Pragmatic variation among spoken and written genres.
• Reflection of orality and colloquialization in social and institutional interaction.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors ([email protected]; [email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review. 

Prof. Dr. Salvador Pons Bordería
Dr. Adrià Pardo Llibrer
Guest Editors

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• 20th-century diachrony
• pragmatics
• grammaticalization
• constructionalization
• colloquialization
• orality and social interaction
• media discourse