First Lecture: 15 January 2023 (total 11 lectures)

First Tutorial: 25 January 2023 (total 11 tutorials)

People do not always say what they mean. So, how do we manage to understand each other if speakers regularly mean something other than what they say? Why don't people just say what they mean? We shall answer these and many other questions in this introductory course to Pragmatics. Some of the topics we shall be concerned with in this course include different levels of meaning, speaker's intention, interpretation and understanding of utterances; the role of context in utterance interpretations; speech acts; conversational implicature; presupposition and politeness.

 

1. Context and structure;
2. Speech act theory;
3. Cooperative principle;
4. Politeness theories;
5. Transcribing spoken interactions;
6. Corpora and communities;
7. Critical discourse analysis;
8. Intercultural pragmatics.

 

1. To introduce the students to the main pragmatic theoretical concepts;
2. To introduce the students to historical and recent developments in the field;
3. To enable the students to engage in pragmatic analysis of spoken and written data using the theoretical concepts that they learnt in class.

 

There will be three class-hours each week:

Lectures (Mondays 12:30—14:20 in CPD LG 10):

• January 15/22/29, February 5/19/26, March 11/25, and April 8/15/22)

Tutorials (Thursdays 12:30 – 13:20 location TBA):

• January 25, February 1/8/22/29, March 14/21/28 and April 11/18/25

In lectures students will listen to the teacher’s explanations and also discuss various issues of pragmatics and discourse. Tutorials will be mostly devoted to preparing you for the assignment tasks.

 

Assessment for the course is 100% coursework. It is comprised of three parts:

1. Tutorials and in-class participation (10%)
   Please note that attendance of all tutorials is mandatory.
2. Mid-term quiz (multiples choice and short open-ended questions) (30%)
3. Course assignment: analysis of authentic discourse data (spoken, written or multimodal) using pragmatic theories discussed in class.

The assignment will be assessed according to the following criteria:
(a) selection of data extract for analysis and transcription (in case of spoken data and multimodal data) (20%);
(b) an essay based on the analysis of the selected data (30%)

(c) peer assessment of group participation (10%)

 

Joan Cutting & Kenneth Fordyce (2021). Pragmatics: A Resource Book for Students. 4^th Edition. London: Routledge.

This textbook is compulsory reading. Paperbacks will be available for purchase through the Academic and Professional Book Centre (A&P). Online copies will be available on the HKU library website.