LIN2330

Pragmatics: Strategies for Communication

(ART)

Keith Allan

6 points + 2 hours per week + Second semester + Clayton, flexible delivery + Prerequisites: a first-year sequence in Linguistics or Communications

Synopsis: The (neo-Gricean) cooperative principle in language interaction; language understanding as a constructive process; sentence meaning and speaker meaning; politeness phenomena; Sperber and Wilson on manifestness, ostension and intention; the nature of practical inference; relevance theory; implicature and presupposition; information structure, definiticity, and anaphora; literal and nonliteral language; theories of speech acts; pragmatics and discourse; pragmatics across cultures and subcultures.

Assessment: Three assignments: 10%, 40% and 40% + Class test: 10%