Pragmatics

This course deals with all aspects of meaning that go beyond the propositional content of the utterance. In order to interpret such meanings, the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which the utterance is produced must be taken into account, as well as the speaker and hearer’s shared knowledge. Another aspect that has to be considered is the speaker’s attitude or emotions towards the content of their own message or the speech act itself. More generally, the aspects of meaning dealt with in this class must be interpreted under the light of language use in a specific situation. Topics that will be addressed are: speech acts, conversationally or conventionally driven inferences, information and discourse structure, contrast, meaning relations between utterances and between discourse segments.       

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Identify the boundaries (or lack thereof) between semantics and pragmatics and distinguish between different levels of meaning (truth-conditional, illocutionary, context-dependent, etc.);
• Recognize the linguistic cues that trigger pragmatic meanings;
• Understand different theoretical views to some pragmatic phenomena;
• Present a personal research work to the class, answer potential questions from the audience.

The students have attended the course Semantics as part of the required courses of the first semester. Having also followed the class ‘Meaning matters’ is a plus