Introduction to Pragmatics – Week 2

Course material here.

In this course, I introduce the classical pragmatic phenomena — presuppositions, (conversational and conventional) implicatures, and speech acts — in connection with a basic Neo-Gricean model of discourse.

Class 1: The basic ideas: Gricean pragmatics 1 — Grice 1975, Stalnaker 2014; Gamut 1991
Class 2: The basic ideas: Gricean pragmatics 2 — Grice 1975, Stalnaker 2014; Gamut 1991
Class 3: Presuppositions — Kadmon 1991, Coppock & Champollion 2017; Stalnaker 2014
Class 4: Speech acts — Roberts 2017; Farkas & Bruce 2010
Class 5: Conventional implicatures — Potts 2011; Grice 1975

Note: This class is intended for students that are familiar with the basic ideas of (not necessarily formal) semantics (e.g., Coppock & Champollion 2017: Ch1). The course materials will be made available for participants online.

Literature:
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Coppock, Elizabeth & Lucas Champollion. 2017. Semantics boot camp, Ch8 “Presupposition”, 231–252. http://eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-camp.pdf

Farkas, Donka & Kim Bruce. 2010. On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions. Journal of Semantics 27: 81–118.

LTF Gamut. 1991. Logic, Language, and Meaning, Vol. 1, Ch6 “Pragmatics: Meaning and Usage”, 195–212.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In: P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, vol.3, Academic Press. Reprinted as Ch2 of Grice 1989, 22–40.

Kadmon, Nirit. 1991. Formal pragmatics, Ch1 “Preliminaries”, 3–21.

Potts, Chris. 2011. Conventional implicature and expressive content. In: Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 3, 2516–2536. De Gruyter.

Roberts, Craige. 2017. Speech acts in discourse context. To appear in Daniel Fogal, Daniel Harris & Matt Moss (eds.) New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press.

Stalnaker, Robert. 2014. Common Ground and Keeping Score. Ch2 of Robert Stalnaker. 2014. Context. Oxford University Press.