Brief description
Case studies in how reliable pragmatic meanings arise from the interactions between conventionalized content, speaker intentions, hearer expectations, and general pragmatic pressures. Emphasis on corpus and psycholinguistic methods. Potential topics: exclamatives, affective demonstratives, discourse particles, appositives, scalar terms, negation; progression of topics to be decided largely by the participants. May be repeated for credit. 1-4 units.
Requirements
- Daily readings: Stay up to speed, arrive with questions, complaints, and inspired extensions.
- In-class participation in discussions
- In-class presentation of readings: An organized, student-run discussion, reviewing an entire paper, a specific part of a paper, or a set of (parts of) papers (chapters, monographs, etc.).
- At least one of the following:
- A survey paper that could provide the foundation for a fuller, more original treatment.
- An update to an existing paper, amounting to a substantial revision of a previous draft.
- An experiment design, including all materials and a write-up describing the hypothesis, the thinking behind the hypothesis, and the expected outcome given the hypothesis.
- An original corpus with associated documentation and a description of potential applications.
- A new, original research paper.
Students with documented disabilities
Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) located within the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). SDRC staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the SDRC as soon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066).