Pragmatics Syllabus

Course Outline

Linguistics 626

The table below gives an approximate schedule of classes, assignments, and lectures for this course. On days that are shaded gray, class does not meet.

Day

Reading

Assignment

Lecture

Background
Wed Jan 20 Chapter 1, Levinson: The scope of pragmatics.   Remarks on literal meaning,  
Wed Jan 27 Chapter 1-4. Allwood et al. Do Ch. 2 exercises (all), Ch 4 (1, 2, 3, 4[b,c,e] ) A little bit about sets, Remarks on logic, possible worlds, and truth. paper presenter: Gawron, background lecture ctd.  
Wed Feb 03 Chapter 1-2 Levinson, Levinson (2004) [Deixis Horn-Handbook], Chap 4 Birner, Nunberg (2004) deixis, reference. Deixis exercises Deixis lecture, Notes on Deferred reference, paper ideas.
Wed Feb 10 Chapter 3 Levinson (esp. 3.1, 3.2 except for 3.2.5): Conversational implicature, quantity implicature. readings: Partee (2004). Implicature exercises. Deixis lecture, Notes on Deferred reference, paper ideas.
Wed Feb 17 Chapter 3 Levinson (esp. 3.1, 3.2.4, 3.2.6): Issues with Grice. Wayne (2004) Implicature: Wayne Davis's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on Implicature, Relevance Theory (Wilsonand Sperber 2004), Carston (2004) [Horn & Ward pp. 633-654].   Notes on implicature, Some relevan(ce) observations.
Wed Feb 24 Chapter 4. Birner Ch. 5 (pp. 146-174) Presupposition. Philosophical origins, pragmatics or semantics. Pott's abridged Karttunen (1974), Kadmon (2001) ch.5 [Dynamic Semantics], Stalnaker (1974), Simon (2004). Assignment: Paper outline/bibliography due. Paper template, Presupposition quiz, Presupposition quizdiscussion. Presupposition lecture,
Wed Mar 03        
Wed Mar 10 Chapter 5. Speech Acts, readings: Birner, Ch. 6, Gibbs (1981), Vine (2009), Speech acts as components of meaning Speech act data analysis, Speech Acts.
Wed Mar 17 Chapter 4. Levinson. Conventional Implicature, Dimensions of Meaning. Bach (1999), Potts (2003) [NELS paper], Potts & Kawahara (2004) [Japanese Honorifics],      
Wed Mar 24 Chapter 4. Levinson. Dimensions of Meaning (ctd.), Smith et al (2008) [stylistic meaning], Horn (1985) Metalinguistic Negation, Horn (2013) [conventional implicature and meaning dimension], Davis, Potts, and Spees (2007) [Evidentiality and meaning dimensions].   Metalinguistic Negation.  
Wed Mar 31 H'day H'day H'day
Wed Apr 07 Chapter 4. Levinson. Presupposition II (4.1). Roberts (2006)[presupposition and meaning dimensions], Simons et al. (2010), Tonhauser et al. (2018)      
Wed Apr 14 Chapter 5.1 - 5.3. Allwood et al. Quantification. Do Ch. 5 (1, 2, 7, 11). Lewis (1975)   Quantification and contexts.
Wed Apr 21 Bott and Noveck (2004), Pouscoulos et al. (2007), Geurts and Pouscoulos (2009), Potts et al. (2016)    
Wed Apr 28 Chapter 5: Game-Theoretic Pragmatics, Brief intros to Probability Franke (2012), Degen (2015), Franke and Jager (2016), Degen et al. (2013)    
Wed May 05 Chapter 5: Rational Speech Act Theory, Brief intro to Social Cognition Gergely et al. (1994) [+P], Baker et al. (2006) [+P], Goodman and Stuhlmuller (2013), Degen et al. (2015)   Rational Speech Act Theory Notes.
Wed May 12 Chapter 5: Rational Speech Act Theory, ctd