Introduction to Pragmatics

This course offers a basic introduction to pragmatics. We will be concerned with aspects of meaning that go beyond truth-conditional content and are related to how language is used in context, including  conversational implicatures  (inferences that arise through reasoning about the speaker's adherence to conversational maxims like ”Be as informative as you can ") And  presuppositions  (notions that a speaker or an utterance present as taken for granted). Phenomena like these will lead us to consider the view that meaning in conversation is a product of the lexical meaning of words, the syntax / semantics of the linguistic constructions employed, and how these interact with the context of use and speakers '/ hearers' assumptions .

The course is geared towards students who want to acquire core concepts in pragmatics needed to pursue their studies in linguistics and related disciplines (such as psychology, information science, computational linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc.).