Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
The MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics (2011/12)
Semantics and Pragmatics
This course provides an introduction to the study of linguistic and utterance meaning, with particular reference to topics covered in other courses, language processing, discourse analysis, morphology and syntax.
The course begins with the constituents of word meaning, concepts, and gradually moves to larger constructions, sentence meaning and then to meaning in actual communication, utterance meaning.
In the introductory lecture we define the goals of a theory of meaning and in lecture 2 theories of word meaning are discussed from a linguistic, philosophical and cognitive science perspective. Lectures 3 and 4 discuss the lexicon and phenomena that arise when considering the combination of words (argument structure, theta-roles, semantic templates), and lecture 5 introduces truth-conditional semantics and discusses predication, quantification and scope from a formal semantic perspective. Lectures 5 to 9 cover the areas of pragmatics, the meaning of actual utterances used in communication. They introduce Grice's seminal theory on the difference between information that is grammatically encoded and information that is pragmatically inferred, and they consider conversational implicature and presupposition, post-Gricean developments and finally Speech Act theory. In every lecture, we will be especially interested in experimental evidence that is relevant to the theoretical issues at hand.
Reading for this course will include:
- Grice, H.P. 1989. "Logic and Conversation", in H.P. Grice Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp 22-41.
- Laurence, S. and Margolis, E. 1999. Concepts and cognitive science, in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds) op cit.
- Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Margolis, E. and Laurence, S. 1999. Concepts: Core Readings. Cambrige, MA: MIT Press
- Noveck, I. and Sperber, D. 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Saeed, J. 1997. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
- de Swart, H. 1998. Introduction to Natural Language Semantics. Stanford, Ca: CSLI Publications.
