Learning Outcomes
Students will develop a better understanding of the following areas in linguistic pragmatics: the distinction between semantic/pragmatic aspects of meaning, deixis, presupposition, theory of implicature, speech-act theory. Students will be able to follow actively and autonomously research developments in theoretical and applied pragmatics.
Course Content (Syllabus)
In this course, students will learn that we do not only describe the world with language (as is shown in semantic studies), but most importantly, we act and perform in language, or, in one word, we socialize, get married, undertake to help others, apologize, or request, and all this is done exclusively with language. We often mean much more than what we say. We will examine all these issues in the component of the course called pragmatics, but we’ll also see how the two components of semantics (meaning in language) and pragmatics (meaning more than you say or do in language) are intrinsically intertwined every time we use language. The course is of immediate interest for the language teacher as it underpins current teaching methodologies, but it is also of interest to a variety of other language-based disciplines, s.a. literature, language impairment (semantic and pragmatic disorders), psychiatry, translation, computational linguistics, language programming, etc.
Keywords
pragmatics, subtext, hypertext, speech acts, deixis, presupposition
Additional bibliography for study
Carston, Robyn (2002). Relevance Theory: the Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing.
Chierchia, Gennaro & Sally McConnellGinet
(1900). Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
Davis, Steven (ed.) (1991). Pragmatics: a reader. Oxford University Press.
Levinson, Stephen (2000). Presumptive Meanings: a theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
Levinson, Stephen (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Marmaridou, Sophia (2000). Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. John Benjamins Publishing Company
May, Jacob (1993). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing.