Current course offerings

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Course description

Learning a second language not only involves understanding the structure of that language, but also learning how language is used for different purposes across a range of different contexts and modalities. In this course, you will study language from the point of view of its users, the choices they make and constraints they encounter in using language in different settings, and the effects of their use of language on other people. You will also study how what is meant always goes well beyond what is simply said or written. Drawing from research in discourse and pragmatics, this course will give you an overview of the way language is used in different communicative situations, and illustrate how meaning that goes beyond what is said is constructed relative to contexts. You will analyse a number of key pragmatic dimensions of language use, including reference, information structure and presupposition, inference and implicature, and speech acts, and examine how the pragmatics of second languages are learned. While the data used in the course will come primarily from English, the theoretical perspectives and analytical methods employed have implications for the acquisition and teaching of all second languages.

Archived offerings