Pragmatics

Catalog description

What is the relationship between what words mean and how they are used? What is part of the grammar and what is a result of general reasoning? Pragmatics is often thought of as the study of how meaning depends on the context of utterance. However, it can be difficult to draw a line between pragmatics and semantics. In this course, we will investigate various topics that walk this line, including varieties of linguistic inference (including entailment and implicature), the pragmatics and compositional semantics of presupposition, anaphora and dynamic semantics, the semantics and pragmatics of focus, indexicals, and speech acts.