- UCAS course code
- VR11
- UCAS institution code
- M20
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
BA History and French
Combine a specialist study of French culture with a range of diverse historical periods.
Duration: 4 years
Year of entry: 2025
UCAS course code: VR11 / Institution code: M20
- Key features:
Study abroad
Study with a language
- Typical A-level offer: AAB including specific subjects
- Typical contextual A-level offer: ABC including specific subjects
- Refugee/care-experienced offer: ACC including specific subjects
- Typical International Baccalaureate offer: 35 points overall with 6,6,5 at HL including specific subjects
Fees and funding
Fees
Tuition fees for home students commencing their studies in September 2025 will be £9,535 per annum (subject to Parliamentary approval). Tuition fees for international students will be £26,500 per annum. For general information please see the undergraduate finance pages.
Policy on additional costs
All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).
Scholarships/sponsorships
Scholarships and bursaries are available to eligible Home/EU students, this is in addition to the government package of maintenance grants.
- Find out more from Student Finance
- International student? Check your country page
- Interested in a student internship?
Course unit details:
Pragmatics: Meaning, Context, and Interaction
| Unit code | LELA20291 |
|---|---|
| Credit rating | 20 |
| Unit level | Level 2 |
| Teaching period(s) | Semester 1 |
| Available as a free choice unit? | Yes |
Overview
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.)
Pre/co-requisites
| Unit title | Unit code | Requirement type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| French Language 3 | FREN51030 | Pre-Requisite | Compulsory |
| English Word and Sentence Structure | LELA10301 | Pre-Requisite | Compulsory |
| Study of Meaning | LELA10331 | Pre-Requisite | Compulsory |
For English Language or Linguistics Credit:
Compulsory Pre-requisite: LELA10301 - English Word and Sentence Structure AND LELA10331 - Study of Meaning. Students who do not meet this pre-requisite must gain academic approval before they can be enrolled.
For French Credit:
Compulsory Pre-requisite: FREN51030 - French Language 3. Students who do not meet this pre-requisite will not be able to access the material.
Aims
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.
Syllabus
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
Teaching and learning methods
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
Knowledge and understanding
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.
Intellectual skills
- Analytical skills
- Argumentation skills
- Abstract thinking skills
Practical skills
- Data collection skills
- Qualitative data analysis skills
Transferable skills and personal qualities
- Communication skills
- Team-working skills
- Time-management skills
- Enhanced intercultural awareness
Assessment methods
Assessment Task | Formative or Summative | Weighting |
Final Exam | Summative | 80% |
Satisfactory completion of weekly written group assignments for the seminars | Formative and Summative | 10% |
Satisfactory completion of weekly assigned work for the lectures | Formative and Summative | 10% |
Feedback methods
Feedback Method | Formative or Summative |
Oral and written feedback on exam performance | Formative and Summative |
Written feedback on participation-related submissions and seminar assignments | Formative and Summative |
Oral feedback on in-class contributions, participation related submissions, and seminar assingments | Formative and Summative |
Recommended reading
Bailey, Benjamin. 1997. Communication of respect in interethnic service encounters. Language in Society 26: 327-356. (LEL students ONLY)
Béal, Christine. 1992. Did you have a good weekend? Or why there is no such thing as a simple question in cross-cultural encounters. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 15(1): 23-52. (FS students ONLY)
Huang, Yan. 2014. Pragmatics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ALL students)
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. (ALL students)
Senft, Gunter. 2014. Understanding Pragmatics. Abingdon: Routledge. (ALL students)
Sidnell. Jack. 2010. Conversation Analysis. An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (ALL students)
Zhu, Hua. 2014. Exploring Intercultural Communication. Language in Action. Abingdon: Routledge. (ALL students)
Study hours
| Scheduled activity hours | |
|---|---|
| Assessment written exam | 3 |
| eAssessment | 20 |
| Lectures | 16.5 |
| Seminars | 16.5 |
| Independent study hours | |
|---|---|
| Independent study | 144 |
Teaching staff
| Staff member | Role |
|---|---|
| Maj-Britt Hansen | Unit coordinator |