BA History and French

This course covers central topics in pragmatics, studying how meaning is generated by the use of language in specific contexts of communication.

Subtopics covered include conversation analysis, (im)politeness, intercultural communication, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and deixis. Consideration will be given to the interaction between semantics and pragmatics, both synchronically and diachronically, and/or to the ways in which pragmatic and interactional constraints may contribute to shaping the linguistic system.

While English will be the main language of study, data from other languages will be included to highlight crosslinguistic variation. (NB! If the module is taken for credit in French, that will be the main language of study in seminars and with respect to the assessment.)

The course aims to address the question of how meaning is created and interpreted by the use of language in specific communicative contexts. More specifically:

• The distribution of labor between the linguistic code and features of the context.
• The typology of contextually generated meanings.
• The specific principles that can be hypothesized to underlie different types of contextually generated meaning.
• The ways in which the structure of verbal interaction itself can create meanings.

Week 1 Introduction to the study of pragmatics

Week 2 Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology

Week 3 Conversation Analysis (cont.) / (Im)politeness

Week 4 (Im)politeness (cont.)

Week 5 Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication

Week 6 Deixis and subjectivity

Week 7 Entailment vs presupposition

Week 8 Conversational implicature

Week 9 Speech acts

Week 10 Conventional Implicature; The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Week 11 Revision

16 ½ hours of lectures, 16 ½ hours of seminars featuring a variety of tutor-led and student-led activities, including regular practice exercises.

Lectures, supporting materials, and assignments will be made available on Blackboard

By successfully completing this course students will be able to:

• Identify and analyze the empirical phenomena that are central to pragmatics, including recurrent patterns in verbal interaction;
• Analyze new data representing language use in context applying appropriate methodologies, as well as a precisely defined metalinguistic and metadiscursive vocabulary;
• Understand the main theoretical approaches to the different subfields of pragmatics, and the relations that obtain between those approaches;
• Reflect critically on their own communicative practice and that of others.

• Analytical skills
• Argumentation skills
• Abstract thinking skills

• Data collection skills
• Qualitative data analysis skills

• Communication skills
• Team-working skills
• Time-management skills
• Enhanced intercultural awareness