LIN2330

Pragmatics: strategies for communication

Keith Allan

8 points
* 3 hours per week
* First semester
* Clayton

Objectives Upon completion of this subject students should be able to come to appreciate that language understanding is a constructive process using not only knowledge of the language but also inferences based on context, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of the conventions of language use; recognise that communication cannot function without conventions such as the cooperative principle in language interaction originally identified by Grice, and/or Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory; recognise the way in which politeness strategies (more precisely, face concerns) function as a significant component of language understanding; have some basis for dealing with the fact that different pragmatic conventions across cultures and subcultures can lead to unforeseen misunderstandings; understand the nature of practical inference, and how to calculate implicature; gain a firm grasp of the main principles, achievements, and limitations of speech act theories; justify categorising expressions as either literal or non-literal, direct or indirect, on-record or off-record.

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%

Prescribed texts

To be advised