LG483

Pragmatics:

Discourse and Rhetoric

Outline

The course consists of ten lecture-plus-seminar/workshops. The lecture component will introduce theoretical concepts, issues and perspectives on them from a range of practicioners; in the seminar/workshop component we will engage with contemporary debate on these issues and apply our knowledge of various analytical perspectives to problems in the investigation of language use.

Starting with the issue of whether it is possible to posit rules of language use, we shall explore how what is said is not necessarily what is meant, by examining the central role of intention in language use, proceeding to consider the notions of Gricean implicature and Speech Act Theory. Consideration of some of the important issues relating to implicature and illocutionary force leads us to explore two of the pervasive forms of figurative language: metaphor and irony. We examine linguistic and literary treatments of these. The second half of the course will consider how linguistic resources may be applied to various types of text analysis. We examine forms of reference, with a focus on deixis and anaphora, showing how linguistic choices may be revealing of social relationships; coherence in texts, with particular reference to recent work in script theory; the production and construction of descriptions; and an important application of linguistic analysis, forensic discourse analysis. Finally we examine a method which has attracted much recent controversy: critical discourse analysis. We evaluate work in the field in the context of a more general assessment of work on discourse as a whole.

Recommended Reading

There are several introductory books on Pragmatics, perhaps the most comprehensive and authoritative of which is still S.C. Levinson (1983) Pragmatics (C.U.P).

Other useful introductions:

Cruse, D.A. (2004) Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. (OUP)

Grundy, P. (2008) Doing Pragmatics 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press)

Horn, L. R. and Ward, G. (2004) The Handbook of Pragmatics. (Basil Blackwell)

Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (eds.) (2006) The Discourse Reader, 2^nd edition. (Routledge)

Verschueren, J. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics. (Arnold)

Yule, G. (1996) Pragmatics (OUP)

Good reference sources:

Östman, J-O., & Verschueren, J., in collaboration with Eline Versluys (eds.) (2006) Handbook of Pragmatics (John Benjamins). Chapter 1 is a good introduction.

Kasher, A. (ed.) (1998) Pragmatics: Critical Concepts. (Routledge)

Keep an eye out for relevant articles in the Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society, the Journal of Sociolinguistics and Discourse and Society. The website for the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) is also a good source of up-to-date information, and is at: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/

Timetable

(see the week-by-week guide, handed out in class, for references)

Week 2       Pragmatics, discourse, rhetoric: an introduction

                   (Reading: Levinson, 1983: Chapter 1)

Week 3       Meaning what we say and saying what we mean

                   (Reading: Levinson, 1983: Chapter 3)

Week 4       Implicature in conversation

                   (Reading: Grice, 1975, in Jaworski and Coupland, 2006)

Week 5       Speech Acts and illocutionary force

(Reading: Levinson, 1983: Chapter 5; Austin, 1962, in Jaworski and Coupland, 2006)

Week 6       Figurative language

                   (Reading: Giora, 2003; Haiman, 1998)

Week 7       Forms of reference: deixis and anaphora

                   (Reading: Green, 2008, ch. 2; Fillmore, 1997)

Week 8       Coherence and cohesion in texts

(Reading: Kehler, 2002; Johnson-Laird, 1983)

Week 9       Producing descriptions

                   (Reading: Edwards and Potter, 1992; Edwards, 1998)

Week 10     Forensic discourse analysis

                   (Reading: Coulthard and Johnson, 2007, Olsson, 2008)

Week 11     Current developments in Pragmatics

                   (Reading: Enfield and Levinson, 2006)