Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Synopsis Pragmatics is the study of language in use. As studied in this subject, it is the context dependent assignment of meaning to language expressions (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, longer texts) used in acts of speech and writing. We will also broach the question of how pragmatics relates to semantics. Constituent topics of the subject will be 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 acats; pragmatics and discourse; pragmatics across cultures and subcultures.
Assessment Short written exercise(s) (1000 words): 20% + Essay(s) (4000 words): 65% + Class participation and one 50-minute final test: 15%