The 12th International Conference on Functional Pragmatics was held July 14 – 15, 2016 at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The conference addressed the current debate on the internationalisation of education in an academic context and beyond, and its consequences for language policies in schools and universities. What are opportunities and challenges of various national languages of science and education and multilingualism in the context of scholarly communication (‘Wissenskommunikation’) and linguistic diversity in Europe? This focus was building onto the two domains which were also addressed in the FP conference in Antalya in 2014: ‘Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication’ and ‘Text and Discourse’.

In the domain of ‘Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication’, topics included language contact, receptive multilingualism, Code Switching, Lingua Franca communication, language typology, sociolinguistics of multilingualism, dialectics of universality and individual languages, imaging the Other in texts and discourse, etc. In the domain of ‘Text and Discourse’, topics included scientific texts, judicial discourse, institutional communication, homileïc discourse, literary and non-literary narratives and discourse species, rhetorical figures of speech in discourse and text, grammatical constructions in text and discourse, particles, etc.

The conference program included plenary lectures in the morning and parallel sessions in the afternoon, for paper presentations and data sessions. The conference languages were German, English, Dutch and other multilingual communicative modes that facilitate the mutual understanding within an international academic community.

The 12th International Conference on Functional Pragmatics was sponsored by Brill, John Benjamins and the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS.