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Cursus: TLRMV17103
TLRMV17103
Semantics and Pragmatics: Variation and Representation
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeTLRMV17103
Studiepunten (EC)5
Cursusdoelen
(I) to give the student a comprehensive overview of several key phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics divide, and of the theoretical frameworks that aim to model these phenomena
(II) to teach the student the skills needed to be able to do research themselves within the context of such theories
(III) to give students the skills needed to formulate theoretical proposals, report on them and test them in the future.
Inhoud
The semantics/pragmatics distinction is an integral part of the received wisdom in formal linguistics. Nevertheless, the nature of the distinction is very much subject to discussion itself and, in fact, many of the hot topics in the study of meaning today straddle the semantics/pragmatics divide in interesting and largely unexpected ways. The goal of this course is to allow the student to understand the controversies that exist as well as the theoretical frameworks that accommodate such issues. The successful student will be able to conduct research within the context of such frameworks herself.
 
The semantics/pragmatics divide is often paralleled to Grice’s distinction between saying and implicating. More broadly, however, one could say that while semantics is responsible for conventional aspects of meaning, such as truth-conditions and conditions of use, pragmatics models conversational aspects of meaning: roughly, the way a particular use may modify semantic meaning. The very division between semantics and pragmatics has never been uncontroversial, however. Interestingly, the emerging debates rely heavily on empirical methods that are new to the field, ranging from experimental to computational methods.
 
Apart from introducing the general semantics-pragmatics distinction, each year the course focuses on one particular topic within the combined field of semantics and pragmatics. Example topics are: scalar implicature, presupposition, expressives, normativity and modality, subjectivity, etc.

Career orientation:
In the course you will work on further developing several general career skills, such as team work, communication, writing and project and time management. 
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