Course Description
Semantic and pragmatic approaches to the study of meaning in Spanish. Differences between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Analysis of types of discourse in Spanish such as narrative and free conversation. Given in Spanish.
Athena Title
SP SEM & PRAGMATICS
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will be introductd to some of the central areas of investigation in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. They will examine word, sentence, and utterance meaning in Spanish in light of current theoretical approaches to semantics and pragmetics. Students will study the Spanish language from the point of view of its users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using the language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in an act of communication. Topics will include truth-conditional semantics, deixis and anaphora, implicature, relevance theory, presupposition, speech acts, and discourse and conversation analysis.
Topical Outline
1. Defining semantics and pragmatics 2. Truth-conditional semantics 3. Deixis and definiteness: philisophical and descriptive approaches; person, time, place, and discourse deixis. 4. Implicature: Grice's theory of implicature; the cooperative principle; the maximins; types of implicature. 5. Applications of implicature to Spanish: connecives, modals, metaphor, irony, anaphora. 6. Anaphora: syntatic, semantic and pragmetic constraints on Spanish anaphora; pragmetic and cognitive approaches to anaphora. 7. Presupposition: Logical consequence, semantic entailment, presupposition. 8. Applications of presupposition to Spanish: factive verbs, implicative verbs, clefts and psuedo-clefts, contitionals, questions. 9. Speech acts: speech act theory (Austin, Searle); direct and indirect speech acts. 10. Classification and description of speech acts; application to Spanish. 11. Ethnography of speakaing: Cross-cultural and development studies of language usage; speech events and interpretive frames. 12. Discourse versus conversation analysis: data, goals, methodology. 13. Conversation analysis (CA): turn-taking, conversational structure and preference organization. 14. Applications of CA to Spanish: preferred sequences, conversational repari, presequences. 15. Data collection and transcription conventions.
Syllabus
Public CV