Don’t shoot the messenger. A pragmaphilological approach to birchbark letter no. 497 from Novgorod

The article analyses the communicative function and linguistic form of Novgorod birchbark letter no. 497 (N497) within a pragmaphilological framework. By applying a function-to-form mapping and taking into account the graphic representation of the text, I propose a new reading, in which the messenger plays a central role in the communication chain and in which the spoken word continuously interacts with the production and interpretation of the written document. This makes N497 a ‘communicatively heterogeneous’ text, a recently identified category of birchbark letters which deserves special attention in the wider field of historical pragmatics.