Overview
Aims
Use the structure of pragmatic research to discover personal conclusions about language and communication.
Compare cultural communication methods and identify where misunderstandings are likely to take place.
Analyze any conversation as a piece of linguistic data
Course contents
|
C1. Introduction: Semantics and Pragmatics 1.1. Language as a tool of human interaction 1.2. Different cultures and different modes of interaction 1.3. Pragmatics – the study of human interaction |
|
C2. Context, implicature and reference 2.1. The dynamic context 2.2. Context and convention 2.3. Implications and implicatures |
|
C3. Different cultures, different languages, different Speech Acts 3.1. Preliminary examples and discussion 3.2. Interpretative hypothesis |
|
C4. Cross-cultural pragmatics and different cultural values 4.1. Self-assertion 4.2. Directness 4.3. Different attitudes to emotions |
|
C5. Describing conversational routines 5.1. Conversational analysis: linguistic or non-linguistic pragmatics? 5.2. Compliment response routines 5.3. Compliment responses in different cultures |
|
C6. Speech Acts and speech genres across languages and cultures 6.1. Frameworks for analyzing a culture’s “forms of talk” 6.2. The problem of other minds |
|
C7. The semantics of illocutionary forces 7.1. Interjections across cultures 7.2. Particles and illocutionary meanings 7.3. Quantitative illocutionary acts. |
Learning outcomes
This course provides an introduction to pragmatics, an important sub-field of linguistics. Pragmatics is the study of contextualized meaning in language. In pragmatics, we examine the relationship between the meaning of an utterance and the context in which the utterance is produced. In this course, we will explore a wide range of topics in the discipline, such as presupposition, implicature, speech acts, deixis and reference. Students will read original and recent work in these areas, and engage themselves in analyzing different types of utterances and their meanings as they are shaped by different pragmatic factors.
Assessment
analyses of utterances - weekly assignments (20%), written examination (75%), class participation (5%)