230111 Pragmatics (S) (WiSe 2016/2017)

Consider a situation like this:

A: Who has eaten the last cookies?

B: I washed Sarah’s sheets this morning and they were covered with crumbs.

So what do Sarah’s sheets have to do with the question asked? And why would A most likely not argue with B’s reply (as it’s not a literally relevant answer to A’s question)? The fact that A would believe B’s answer to be relevant is an example of implicature: B thinks that Sarah might have eaten the last cookie. We therefore have to distinguish what is strictly said from what is meant.
Pragmatics is a field of linguistic research that looks at phenomena like the one above. It looks at language in context and takes into consideration how it is used by speakers. Context dependence or sensitivity is (among others) a decisive criterion that distinguishes pragmatics from semantics.
In this seminar, we will aim at gaining insights into both theoretical as well as empirical pragmatics, thus addressing a number of different theories and domains. We will talk in detail about implicature, presuppositions, speech acts, and deixis. We will also address issues related to discourse structure and cross-cultural pragmatics.