Enrollment year
2012/2013
Academic discipline
L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS)
Department
DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES
Curriculum
PERCORSO COMUNE
Period
(23/02/2015 - 30/05/2015)
Lesson hours
36 lesson hours
Prerequisites
Basic notions of general linguistics are required.
Learning outcomes
The course aims to enable students to recognize, describe and analyze the information structure and the pragmatic dimension of a text.
Course contents
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.
Teaching methods
Lectures
Reccomended or required readings
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.
Assessment methods
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.
Further information
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.
Sustainable development goals - Agenda 2030