My research is interested in the pre-Old English runic corpus, which is a corpus defined as runic inscriptions with find-spots in Britain which are dated before c.650CE. My over-arching research question is, ‘what are the functions of the pre-Old English runic inscriptions?’. By asking this question, I am planning to tackle the theoretical problem of what we mean by the ‘functions’ of a text. Do we mean communicative functions, and what does that entail? – can texts with no discernable lexical item be communicative, and if so, how? How do we include non-communicative functions in our taxonomy, and what would they be? Another research question is, ‘how do we measure these functions?’.  My methodology will use approaches from runology, historical pragmatics (especially pragmaphilology), and archeology and material culture studies.