So far, eighteen International Pragmatics Conferences have been held, the first one being a precursor to the actual founding of the International Pragmatics Association.
All these conferences were organised from the University of Antwerp (and two of them at the university itself):
- 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]
- New Delhi, India, 8-13 September 2013 [narrative pragmatics]
- Antwerp, Belgium, 26-31 July 2015 [language and adaptability]
- Belfast, Northern Ireland, 16-21 July 2017 [pragmatics in the real world]
- Hong Kong, China, 9-14 June 2019 [pragmatics of the margins]
- Winterthur, Switzerland (online), 27 June - 2 July 2021 [pragmatics of inclusion]
- Brussels, Belgium (hybrid), 4-9 July 2023 [the pragmatics of (a)typicality]