LING 6425 - Pragmatics

(crosslisted) COGST 6425, PHIL 6720

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: LING 3303 or PHIL 2310, or permission of instructor. Co-meets with COGST 4425/LING 4425/PHIL 4720.

D. Abusch.

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, presupposition, and implicature), anaphora, indexicals, and speech acts.