Pragmatics

Course description: The 15-week course is designed to introduce the role of pragmatics in a general linguistic theory of meaning, as well as discussing a number of pragmatic universals and features of meaning about that role. The course offers an introduction of pragmatic theories and phenomena as a background for adequate analysis to understand utterances. It starts by addressing the question of what pragmatics is concerned with. It will then have students relate the context of utterances and its interaction with conventional semantic content in light of basic analyses of pragmatic phenomena: implication, implication relations, conversational implicatures, presuppositions, deixis, conventional implicatures, and speech acts. In each subject area, students will be connected to a discussion, and challenged by the survey. Then they will get involved in critical reading work.