Enrollment year
2017/2018
Academic discipline
L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS)
Department
DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES
Course
THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS; LINGUISTICS AND MODERN LANGUAGES
Curriculum
PERCORSO COMUNE
Period
(26/02/2018 - 01/06/2018)
Lesson hours
36 lesson hours
Prerequisites
Familiarity with basic notion in general linguistics, particularly syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as they are offered in the three-year Bachelor's degrees in Humanities.
Learning outcomes
In this course we learn how to conduct semantic analysis focusing on the interplay between lexical/semantic representations, syntactic forms and pragmatics. The course privileges a corpus-based approach to linguistic investigation.
Course contents
The course aims to provide students with an overview of major contemporary theories regarding the interplay between semantics and pragmatics in language use. Both cognitive and formal approaches are discussed, focusing on the analysis of specific linguistic phenomena from a crosslinguistic perspective. At the end of the course the students are asked to conduct a semantic and pragmatic analysis using empirical data from linguistic resources (annotated corpora, computational lexicons, treebanks, etc.).
1. Introduction
2. Pragmatic competence.
3. What is (not) said.
4. Types of inference.
5. Semantics and Pragmatics.
6. Applications.
Teaching methods
Interactive Lectures
Slides
Lab with group activities aiming at applying the models introduced and discussed in class to the analysis of empirical data.
Reccomended or required readings
Textbooks
Pragmatics: Bianchi, C., 2011. Pragmatica del linguaggio. Giuseppe Laterza & Figli Spa.
Semantics and the Lexicon: Jezek, E. 2016. The Lexicon: An Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Readings
Piantadosi, S., Tilyb H., Gibson E. 2012. The communicative function of ambiguity in language. In Cognition, vol. 211, issue 3, 280-291.
Pustejovsky, J. and E. Jezek 2012. Introducing Qualia Structure. In Generative Lexicon Theory: a Guide. Oxford, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming.
Recanati, F. 2016. “ Contextualism and Polysemy“. To be published in a volume on Word Meaning edited by M. Textor, R. Carston and T. Pritchard, available online.
Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2007. "A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts". In N. Burton-Roberts (ed.) Advances in Pragmatics. Palgrave, London, pp. 230-259.
Assessment methods
Final oral exam covering material from the entire course.
Final assignment (8 pages) reporting the results of an in-depth corpus-based analysis of a linguistic phenomenon previously agreed during office hours. The text in pdf format must be sent to jezek@unipv.it 7 days before the exam.
Further information
Material for the course - including the updated list of readings, the slides of the lectures, links to available datasets, instructions for the final assignment - are available on the KIRO platform (access with personal username and password).
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