課程介紹

課程目標

The goals of this introductory course are: to make students know about the relationship between language use and human action; to give students a basic understanding of pragmatics and its relationship to syntax and semantics; to make students aware of recent work in the field; to suggest interesting research topics; and to promote a general approach to the study of linguistic phenomena which is based on the analysis of naturally-occurring data, and which draws on insights from all relevant areas of linguistic theory.

課程綱要

Topics to be covered in this course are listed as followings:

Reference & context (including discourse entities and anaphora)
Implicature (including a brief overview of truth-functional meaning)
Presupposition: semantic and pragmatic
Functions of syntactic constructions (including information-packaging; given/new, topic/comment, etc.)
Other topics, including politeness and discourse analysis.

授課方式

Lecture and discussion

教材

Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in Interaction. N.Y.: Longman

作業說明
評分標準

Students are expected to attend class regularly and to participate fully in class activities. During class hours, they are required to practice the wide-ranging set of discussion questions and exercises. Aside from these, the following tasks are demanded as well:

•(1) Class participation (20%)

•(2) Exercises and assignments (20%)

•(3) Midterm Examination (30%)

•(4) Class project (30%): Locate an interesting set of data in some language, and give a critical summary/review of the arguments in previous studies. Discuss the nature of the data set, and propose the solution. The project consists of the following two parts:

•a. A one-page written statement of the name of the language, a short description of the data of interest, and a list of references.

•b. A ten-minute oral presentation on the nature of the problem and solution. Make a handout showing the data, and the analysis.

A complete write-up, which shows the data, review of previous arguments, the solution, along with references and any comments. Approximately 4-6 pages.

其他