Introduction to Pragmatics (2nd Year BA)

What we communicate when we speak will always be interpreted in a certain way by the hearer. Pragmatics is interested in finding out about how people interpret a message, and what role the context plays: if somebody says, “you're fired!” we may take this as a joke - or start worrying about our future, depending on who says it. Pragmatics investigates what utterances can achieve, and how the role of the participants is important. If somebody answers to the question “do you like ice-cream?” by saying “is the Pope Catholic?” we can still, make sense of the answer. Pragmatics looks into why this is so. If two or more people speak to each other, there always is a clear pattern of who gets to speak when. Pragmatics analyses what the rules for this are in different cultures. The objectives of the course are to introduce the main topics in pragmatics and apply them to both daily conversations and to literary and non-literary texts. Course reading and course requirements will be discussed in the first session.