Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften

The field of pragmatics is concerned with the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. It investigates how we use language in all kinds of interactions, for example, to describe the world around us, to influence other people, to express our feelings, etc. Pragmatics is therefore closely related to other branches of linguistics – particularly to semantics but also to branches which predominantly focus on social or cultural surroundings, such as sociolinguistics or discourse analysis.

In this course, we will approach the field of pragmatics from a variety of perspectives. We will start by looking at the borderline between semantics and pragmatics, and then approach ways of dealing with implicit meanings (such as presuppositions or implicatures). After that, we will discuss major pragmatic concepts, e.g. speech act theory, the Cooperative Principle, or the maxims of conversation. The course will work with both spoken and written data, i.e. we will look into aspects of Conversation Analysis, but also analyse (literary) texts. Other notions which will be addressed include politeness, face, and pragmatics across cultures. 

Requirements and background readings will be discussed in the first session.