Course Title

Pragmatics

Course Number

10306334

Instructor Name

Sufyan Abuarrah

Contact Information

[email protected]

Semester(s) and academic year(s)

Second Semester 2014

Compulsory / Elective

Compulsory

Pragmatics is the study of how speakers communicate meaning in context. For example, the first person pronoun has no meaning unless it is used in a particular context. Without context we cannot assign its reference. The course goals will be (1) to understand the kind of connection between truth-conditioned propositions (semantics) and context-dependent utterances (pragmatics), and (2) understand how context could change the utterance meaning and help us work out its intended meaning. Though this course is an introduction to pragmatics, it touches on several core issues like indexicality (e.g. words like this and that in relation to context), speech acts (e.g. how directives are different from expressives in terms of illocutionary force) implicature (what is implicated; that is, communicated though unsaid), and politeness (what are the different orientations to politeness and how to distinguish one community from another based on that). 

Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics by Jenny Thomas.