2013/2014

2014/2015

DM270

L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS)

DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS; LINGUISTICS AND MODERN LANGUAGES

PERCORSO COMUNE

2°

2nd semester (23/02/2015 - 30/05/2015)

6

36 lesson hours

ITALIAN

ORAL TEST

MAURI CATERINA (titolare) - 6 ECTS

Basic notions of general linguistics are required.

The course aims to enable students to recognize, describe and analyze the information structure and the pragmatic dimension of a text.

Introduction
- Introduction to pragmatics and text linguistics: what is pragmatics, what is a text. Definitions and theories in comparison.
- Introduction to linguistics of text comprehension: production vs. understanding, misunderstanding, literal and non-literal meaning, semantic and pragmatic level, cooperation. Overview of theories of language and text comprehension.

The text, textuality and situationality
- How to recognize a 'text': the criteria for textuality.
- Cohesion and coherence.
- Inside and outside the text: text, co-text, context. Deictic and anaphoric phenomena.

Production and interpretation of utterances: speech acts and conversation
- The semantic-communicative unit of a text: sentences and utterances, levels of analysis and information structure.
- Exchanges of texts, exchanges of utterances: the logic of conversation and the interpretation of what is not said, coding vs. inference. The mechanisms that underlie mutual (mis-)understanding: main theories in comparison.
- Language in action: speech acts and performativity.
- Elements of conversation and discourse analysis: shifts, breaks, repairs, courtesy, compliments, agreement and disagreement. The vague language.

Lectures

Attending students
Teaching materials will be made available weekly online.
The two reference books are:

- ANDORNO C., 2003, Linguistica testuale. Un'introduzione, Roma, Carocci.
- ANDORNO C., 2005, Che cos'è la pragmatica linguistica, Roma, Carocci.
- BIANCHI, C. 2009. Pragmatica cognitiva. I meccanismi della comunicazione. Laterza Editore. - Chapter 2-3.
- DE MAURO T. 1999. Capire le parole, Laterza Editore.

Below you can find a provisional list of texts that will be referred to during the course. At the end of each lecture, the professor will explicitly indicate the chapters and/or sections where students will be able to find the issues discussed in class.

- Mauri, C. and van der Auwera, J. (2012a). "Connectives". In Kasia Jaszczolt and Keith Allan (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, pp. 347-402. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Searle, J.: 1975, ‘Indirect Speech Acts’, in Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics Volume 3: Speech Acts, Academic Press, pp. 59–82.
- Grice, H.P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press.
- Wilson, D. and Carston R. (2007). A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and Ad Hoc. In Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics. Palgrave, London: 230-259.
- Wilson, D. 2006. The pragmatics of verbal irony: echo or pretence? Lingua 116: 1722-1743

Non-attending students
Non-attending students should write an e-mail to the professor in advance, in order to decide the texts study for the exam.

The exam will be written and oral.
Written part: analysis of a text on the basis of the notions discussed during the course. The oral part is obligatory.

The exam will be written and oral.
Written part: analysis of a text on the basis of the notions discussed during the course. The oral part is obligatory.