– "Will you marry me?"
– "Of course – the day hell freezes over."
Speakers do not always mean what they say – sometimes, they mean the exact opposite. This class will examine how we manage to communicate and understand more than is actually said, and how we perform actions just through the power of words. Areas we will look at include: Relevance Theory, Speech Acts, and Discourse Analysis. Phenomena like metaphor, irony, and politeness will also be examined.
This course will be largely presentation/discussion-based, so active participation is a must. All students are required to purchase and read Yule's Pragmatics (1996) before the course begins.
Course book: Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Additional texts will be announced in class. |
