HANDBOOK OF THE PRAGMATICS OF CMC

Editors:

Susan C. Herring (Indiana University Bloomington, USA)
Dieter Stein (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany)
Tuija Virtanen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)

The Handbook of Pragmatics series aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. The series will operate with a wide conception of pragmatics; it will reflect the state of the art in a comprehensive and coherent way; it will be internationally oriented; it will be interdisciplinary; and it will provide reliable orientational overviews useful not only to researchers but also to students and teachers.

A significant body of pragmatic literature has accumulated over the past 20 years on computer-mediated communication (CMC), defined as text-based interactive communication via the Internet, websites and other multimodal formats, and mobile communication. Thus it is appropriate and timely for this scholarship to be gathered together in a handbook. The Handbook of the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication will include three main types of content:

1) Overviews of pragmatically-focused research on genres or modes of CMC, e.g., chat, email, listservs, Usenet, blogs, IM, SMS, websites, graphical virtual worlds

2) Overviews or research studies of pragmatic approaches to CMC phenomena, e.g., features such as emoticons, abbreviations, acronyms, and non-standard punctuation; nicks; spam; email hoaxes

3) Overviews or research studies of traditional pragmatic phenomena as they are manifested or take a specific shape in CMC, e.g., implicature, presupposition, Gricean Maxims, relevance, deixis, performativity, speech acts, cohesion and coherence, openings & closings, topic/threading, address terms, politeness, humor, code-switching, and variation based on regional dialect, age, gender, and culture

Submissions will also be considered that address other topics relating clearly to pragmatics and CMC, including, but not limited to, methodology for studying the pragmatics of CMC, pragmatic studies of CMC in institutional contexts, and approaches that capture the interaction of CMC with physical behavior or offline communication.

Submission Guidelines:

Potential contributors should email a 500-700 word proposal, containing a title and a description of the topic and organization of the proposed chapter, OR a complete manuscript draft if one is available (maximum 9,000 words, including all parts; no partial drafts, please) to all three editors by March 15, 2008. Decisions will be sent by late March, and complete, polished versions of accepted proposals or drafts will be due by August 15, 2008. The handbook is anticipated to go into production in summer of 2009.

Full Manuscript Preparation Guidelines:

In preparing full manuscripts, submitters are asked to follow Mouton de Gruyter's stylesheet. The stylesheet will be emailed to all authors who are invited to submit full or revised manuscripts, as well as to any submitter who requests it sooner. In addition, all accepted manuscripts should address the following general recommendations:

• Each article should explicitly relate its theme to pragmatic concepts and the pragmatics literature, even if its antecedents are mostly in another tradition.


• Each article should include a substantial literature review citing a) seminal linguistic/pragmatic work upon which the study is based and b) recent CMC research related to the theme of the chapter.


• As the handbook will be international in scope, citation of relevant CMC references about, and written in, other languages is strongly encouraged.


• Each chapter should engage to some extent with the question of the effects of technological mediation on the phenomena it describes. For contributions on CMC genres and CMC-specific phenomena, this should naturally be an important part of the discussion. For chapters that address traditional pragmatic phenomena, please also include some consideration of how your CMC data resemble, and are different from, what might be expected to occur in other communication modalities.