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Description
Module Content
Different theories of human communication and utterance comprehension are discussed, including Gricean, neo-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches.
Teaching Delivery
The module is taught by ten weekly lectures and backup classes, with discussion continuing on moodle during the week
Indicative Topics
The specific topics and data discussed vary from year to year but are taken from the following list: referring expressions and speaker鈥檚 reference, conversational implicatures, pragmatic enrichments of explicit content, word meaning modulation, unarticulated constituents, indexical saturation, non-literal uses of language (metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, irony).
Module Aims and/or Objectives
By the end of the module, students should have achieved the following: 鈥� An in-depth appreciation of the many ways in which what speakers communicate (and what hearers grasp) transcends linguistically-encoded meaning: 鈥� An understanding of the different kinds of pragmatic processes required for full utterance comprehension: 鈥� An understanding of the nature of different kinds of non-literal meaning and of different theoretical accounts of them:鈥� An ability to analyse the semantic and pragmatic components of utterances 鈥� An ability to critically assess pragmatic theories, claims and arguments.
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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