| Description |
Both linguistic disciplines, semantics and pragmatics, aim at identifying and describing the processes and knowledge that we, as speakers and hearers, either draw meaning from, or put meaning into, in saying/listening or reading/writing. Semantics focuses on the meaning that is either read into or grasped relying only on the knowledge of the language rules. Pragmatics, on the other hand, focuses on the study of language use, and the meaning of utterances depending on the context. In this seminar, we will focus on different types of semantic meanings in words, phrases and sentences, the differences between sense and reference, as well as the sense relations that can be established between different words and sentences. Additionally, we will focus on different pragmatic principles, such as deixis, inference, implicature, presupposition, as well as pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts and politeness, while also tackling the relevance theory and the cooperative principle, giving us varying contexts in which meaning can be realised. |
