Postgraduate Course: Pragmatics of Linguistic Communication (PPLS11005)

Course Outline
School	School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences	College	College of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	10	ECTS Credits	5
Summary	This course focuses on the way that meaning is derived in context, examining how listeners infer what is meant beyond what a speaker explicitly says. The course starts from the observation that linguistic forms are inherently, even necessarily, ambiguous, and the interpretation of ambiguous expressions therefore says a lot about the expectations listeners have for what speakers intend. Topics include the role of presupposition and implicature in language understanding, speakers' use of common ground, the processing of ambiguous and elided material, and the deduction of the implicit relationships that hold between sentences in a larger discourse. We will discuss how these phenomena are analysed within a range of different models - philosophical, computational, and psycholinguistic. The goal of the course is to consider a variety of pragmatic phenomena through the lens of human cognition and to ask how those phenomena are reflected in applied scenarios.
Course description	Not entered

Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered

Learning Outcomes
On completion of the course, students will be able to: - Understand and discuss important concepts in pragmatics - Analyse naturally occurring linguistic data for both structure and function - Evaluate different kinds of explanation in the field of pragmatics - Apply pragmatic concepts in case studies of communication in society