PRAGMATICS (P)

‘How do people communicate?’

This course will introduce students to the study of contextualized meaning in Linguistics — and attempt to answer the question: how do we create meaning from the utterances we make? Pragmatics is the branch of Linguistics that studies how people communicate and understand each other. To get a grasp on this, we will break communication down into speaker meaning, contextual meaning, extra-linguistic communication and relative distance.  Since Pragmatics can also be defined as the “relationship of signs to their users and interpreters” (Horn, 2010), we will also be examining how individuals bring their cultural experiences, worldview, and assumptions to conversations. To analyze these aspects of langauge, we will develop a formal system for discourse analysis and students will come away with the tools to analyze natural language in a formal manner.