Category: English Language

Three colleagues from Northumbria will be talking at the 2026 PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) conference in Uppsala in August 2026.

Billy Clark and Tony Williams will be talking in the Special Interest Group workshop on Pragmatics and Literature. Billy’s talk is titled Pragmatics, reasoning and literary evaluation. Tony’s is ‘I simply do not know what I am doing’: writerly knowledge, ignorance, mystery and mythology.

Saeed Hosseini’s talk is in the main programme and is titled Viewpoint as event: bridging lyric addressand cognitive grammar in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’.

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

Billy PALA August 2026

As ever, the conference is packed with talks and events exploring a very wide range of topics in stylistics. As the PALA programme demonstrates, stylistics is a very broad and dynamic discipline, applying ideas from a very wide range of areas in exploring aspects of the production, interpretation and evaluation of a very wide variety of texts.

In January 2026, two Northumbria colleagues, Billy Clark and Tony Williams will take part in a special session on ‘Producing and Evaluating Style’ at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Toronto

The session will explore ideas from Billy’s project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (MRF-2024-043), which will develop an account of the pragmatic processes involved in producing, interpreting and evaluating communicative acts, as well as how all of these processes interact

You can read more about the MLA session on the MLA Humanities Commons site here:

https://producingandevaluatingstyle.mla.hcommons.org

There will also soon be more information on the project page:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/producing-and-evaluating-style/

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/billyclark-mla2026-pragmaticsandstyle.pptx