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SoSe 14: V-Semantics and Pragmatics I

Anneliese Kuhle

Comments

The two subfields of linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, are both concerned with the study of 'meaning' as encoded by linguistic expressions serving communicative functions. Lexical semantics is commonly understood to be concerned with the analysis of descriptive meanings of content words (e.g., "child", "run" or "skyscraper"). Pragmatics is a less familiar term in connection with such lexical analyses but may become useful once other meaning components (expressive or social meanings in words like "Oh!", "well", "please", "damn") and use-in-context are taken into consideration. On another level, linguistic semantics deals with the meaning of grammatical forms (function words, morphology) as well as the complex meanings of full-fledged grammatical sentences. Yet, again, there are good reasons for treating pragmatics on a par and as complementary to such semantic analyses even in the domain of grammar. While propositional meanings of sentences present the traditional area of semantic investigation, their usage properties and context sensitivity (reference, deixis, conversational implicature) are (also) central aspects of pragmatic analysis.

The above description must remain elusive as long as we have not given proper definitions to the two theoretical concepts which will concern us throughout this lecture. Yet, given the fact that many linguists do not share a unified definition of either 'semantics' or 'pragmatics', we will have to deal with this issue as we approach different linguistic phenomena on the word, phrase and sentence level. Our focus will lie on natural language use and English in particular; yet, the terminology we need in order to eventually capture interesting facts about the English language will have to be taken off the shelf of existing theories inherited from the scientific community. Developments throughout the 20th century have led to very different approaches to the study of language, and hence different semantic/pragmatic theories persist until today. Without proper acknowledgement of this fact, we cannot even begin to make sense when talking about meaning in language.

This course (lecture) will be held in English. Students should have attended at least one introductory course to English linguistics. Further requirements are regular attendance and a willingness to read texts in preparation for each session. Please note that the course will not take place in the first week (18 April is a national holiday). In preparation for the first session 25 April, please read the full Chapter 1 in Lyons (1995), accessible in the FU library. My email contact: akuhle@zedat.fu-berlin.de

References

Lyons, John (1995). Linguistics semantics: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. [Phil. Bib.]