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 | Pragmatics of Linguistic Communication takes a formal pragmatic approach to understanding language use in context. 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 |
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.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
100
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Formative Assessment Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
75 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
final essay (70%) + 3 homeworks (each 10% = 30%) |
| Feedback |
In-class discussion after return of first homework |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student 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
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- Engage critically with primary research literature
- Compose an argument supported by experimental evidence |
| Keywords | pragmatics,communication,language,psycholinguistics |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Hannah Rohde
Tel: (0131 6)50 6802
Email: Cinzia.Discolo@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Toni Noble
Tel: (0131 6)51 3188
Email: |
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