The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

The history of English writing is, to a considerable extent, the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts, the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts, from Ælfric’s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks, display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old, Middle and Modern English periods, this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen, who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research, and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume.

The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.

The history of English writing is, to a considerable extent, the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts, the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts, from Ælfric’s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks, display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old, Middle and Modern English periods, this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen, who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research, and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume.

The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective. The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.