So far, twelve International Pragmatics Conferences have been held, the first one being a precursor to the actual founding of the International Pragmatics Association:
- Viareggio, Italy, September 1985 [special theme: on the issue of coherence in a theory of pragmatics]
- Antwerp, Belgium, 17-22 August 1987 [on intercultural and international communication]
- Barcelona, Spain, 9-13 July 1990 [with a focus on social issues]
- Kobe, Japan, 25-30 July 1993 [connecting social and cognitive issues]
- Mexico City, Mexico, 4-9 July 1996 [on conversation]
- Reims, France, 19-24 July 1998 [on language and ideology]
- Budapest, Hungary, 9-14 July 2000 [on cognition and language use]
- Toronto, Canada, 13-18 July 2003 [on linguistic pluralism]
- Riva del Garda, Italy, 10-15 July 2005 [on pragmatics and philosophy]
- Göteborg, Sweden, 8-13 July 2007 [on language data, corpora, and computational pragmatics]
- Melbourne, Australia, 12-17 July 2009 [diversity, context, and structure]
- Manchester, United Kingdom, 3-8 July 2011 [pragmatics and its interfaces]
Plenary speakers and panel organizers have included Jens Allwood, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Douglas Biber, Manfred Bierwisch, Donald Brenneis, Charles Briggs, Laurel Brinton, Penelope Brown, Mary Bucholtz, Teresa Carbó, Robyn Carston, Fernando Castaños, Eve Clark, Herb Clark, Bernard Comrie, Steven Davis, Wolfgang Dressler, Paul Drew, Oswald Ducrot, Alessandro Duranti, Umberto Eco, Nick Enfield, Gilles Fauconnier, Thorstein Fretheim, Susan Gal, Ray Gibbs, Charles Goodwin, John Gumperz, Jeanette Gundel, Auli Hakalinen, Bill Hanks, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Monica Heller, Susan Herring, Maya Hickman, Janet Holmes, Dell Hymes, Sachiko Ide, Alexandra Jaffe, Kasia Jaszczolt, Andreas Jucker, Hans Kamp, Yasuhiro Katagiri, Paul Kay, Catherine Kerbrat Orecchioni, Manfred Kienpointner, Sotaro Kita, Robin Lakoff, Jocelyn Létourneau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Rosina Marquez Reiter, John Marshall, Jacob Mey, Lorenza Mondada, Elinor Ochs, Jan-Ola Östman, Susan Philips, Ingrid Piller, Csaba Pléh, Clotilde Pontecorvo, Ben Rampton, Celia Roberts, Eddy Roulet, Marina Sbisà, Emanuel Schegloff, Wes Sharrock, Masayoshi Shibatani, Udaya Singh, Dan Slobin, Dan Sperber, Peter Sutton, Paul Takahara, Leonard Talmy, Michael Tomasello, Elizabeth Traugott, Wolfgang Wahlster, Richard Watts, James Wertsch, Anna Wierzbicka, Robert Wilenski, Yorick Wilks, Deirdre Wilson, Ruth Wodak, and many more.
From the second conference onwards, attendance has varied from 600 to 1000, with a dip to 450 as a result of the outbreak of SARS just months before the conference in Toronto.
Selected papers from the Viareggio and Antwerp conferences were published in the following volumes: - Jef Verschueren & Marcella Bertuccelli Papi, 1987, The pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 836 pp.
- Jef Verschueren, 1991, Pragmatics at issue: Selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 17-22, 1987, Vol. I. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 314 pp.
- Jef Verschueren, 1991, Levels of linguistic adaptation: Selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 17-22, 1987, Vol. II. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 339 pp.
- Jan Blommaert & Jef Verschueren, 1991, The pragmatics of intercultural and international communication: Selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 17-22, 1987 (Vol. III) and of the Ghent symposium on intercultural communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 249 pp.
(For ordering information: http://www.benjamins.nl) Because of the long time it usually took to get proceedings into print, no attempts were made to publish papers from the Barcelona, Kobe, and Mexico City conferences, though many excellent and topically coherent collective volumes have been published on the initiative of panel organizers.
The observation that there seemed to be a demand for relatively fast access to at least a selection of conference papers led to a new publishing experiment. For the results, see Selected papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference, and the 7th International Pragmatics Conference. This experiment was however discontinued mainly for budgetary reasons on the occasion of the 8th International Pragmatics Conference. Meanwhile, alternative forms of publication have become more highly valued in academia. Papers from the conferences are published in a wide variety of pragmatics-related journals, and collections from panels often appear in book form.
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