This optional subject is offered in the first term of the fourth year of the English Studies degree. It belongs to the English Linguistics Module M05, and, along with the rest of the subjects in this module, which complement one another, it provides specialisation in a particular discipline.



Pragmatics deals with how hearers manage to go well beyond the linguistic meaning of the speaker's sentence in order to assign reference, disambiguate, complete incomplete meanings, infer implicit content, interpret figurative utterances and much else besides. This subject introduces the concepts, categories and principles proposed by some of the most influential pragmatic theories to explain utterance interpretation, shows how they are used to account for the interpretation of specific linguistic items and looks into the interaction between linguistic knowledge and general cognitive abilities.



This subject is directly connected with Semántica Inglesa, but also with others that attempt to shed light on meaning construction, such as Gramática I and II, Sintaxis Inglesa, Morfología Inglesa and Fonética Inglesa.

COMPETENCES

This subject belongs to the Module M05 English Linguistics. Specifically, it contributes to the achievement of module competence M05CM05:

- M05CM05 To understand the principles proposed by different theories in order to explain the role of the context in the interpretation of utterances and its interaction with the structure of English.



Final achievement of the module competence above entails the fulfilment of the degree competences



- G003 To analyse, synthesise, and explain the grammar and use of English.

- G008 To be able to work autonomously and in teams, making use of the techniques and tools acquired.



LEARNING OUTCOMES



In this course students can:

(1) Define or explain the basic pragmatic concepts, categories and principles.

(2) Point out the differences regarding how concepts and categories are set up across the various theories.

(3) Distinguish linguistically encoded from pragmatically inferred aspects of meaning.

(4) Use pragmatic principles to explain actual cases of utterance interpretation.

(5) Compare and evaluate different pragmatic accounts.

1. Basic concepts



1.1 Sentence, utterance, proposition

1.2 Decoding and inferring

1.3 Communication



2. Austin and Searle’s speech act theory



2.1 Performatives and constatives

2.2 Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts

2.3 Felicity conditions on illocutionary acts

2.4 Typology of illocutionary acts

2.5 Indirect speech acts



3. Grice’s theory of conversation and Levinson’s GCI theory



3.1 What is said and what is implicated

3.2 Conventional implicature

3.3 The cooperative principle and the maxims

3.4 The use of the maxims in the generation of implicatures

3.5 The analysis of ‘figures of speech’

3.6 Particularised and generalized conversational implicatures

3.7 Generalised implicature and the analysis of the logical connectives

3.8 Levinson’s Q-, I- and M-implicatures

3.9 Scalar implicatures and lexicalization



4. Sperber and Wilson’s theory of relevance



4.1 The notion of relevance

4.2 The principles of relevance: cognitive and communicative

4.3 RT concepts and the explanation of different cases of utterance interpretation

The classes will be a mixture of lecturing and practical student work in class. Student work may be individual, in pairs or in groups, and may precede or follow lecturing. In-class activities may include, among other things, powerpoint presentations for lecturing, reading (parts of) papers for question-answer exercises or for discussion and presentation in class, exercises and joint class discussion.



Out-of-class activities will consist in reading, finishing off activities that have been started in class and doing activities in preparation for the next day, and any other task needed for the course.

• Sistema de Evaluación Continua
• Sistema de Evaluación Final
• Herramientas y porcentajes de calificación:
  • Prueba escrita a desarrollar (%): 50
  • Realización de prácticas (ejercicios, casos o problemas) (%): 50

- Evaluation is through continuous assessment. As a form of self-assessment, exercises that will be corrected in class will be used. Amd clearly, students will be able to assess their own understanding of the subject contents and interact with their teacher and classmates to improve understanding.



- As a form of continuous assessment by the teacher, students will take two tests. Each test will carry a weight out of the total marks roughly corresponding to the number of lessons spent on it. The marks obtained in a test will be added if they amount to 40% of the marks in that test. Otherwise, the test will need to be retaken.



The tests and other assessment tools can be passed, failed and retaken independently from each other.



In the event of confinement or other situation making it impossible for exams to happen in a classroom, exams will be taken through Tarea, Cuestionario, etc on eGela or a virtual environment allowed by the university.



Unless otherwise stated, any complementary materials necessary to do the tests will be provided by the teacher. Use of any materials not provided by the teacher, as well as mobiles or other electronic devices, is strictly forbidden.



Following University of the Basque Country regulations, cheating – copying from the notes, the Internet, etc or a classmate – and plagiarism – using somebody’s ideas or words without attributing them to their true author – will result in a fail in the particular exam in which it happened, regardless of the extent of the offence.



Sample tests and marking schemes will be available on the eGela page for the subject at the beginning of the course.



Any modifications affecting the evaluation of this subject that happen after the latest date of publication of this Guía Docente, whatever their cause, will be agreed with the students and will be announced in the ‘Evaluation’ part of our eGela course. Students who do not attend class regularly can look up ‘Evaluation’ in eGela to be up to date.





Withdrawal from Continuous Assessment:

All students have the right to be evaluated according to the final evaluation procedure independently of whether or not they have participated in the continuous or mixed assessment module. In order to do so, they must write to the instructor responsible for the course expressing their desire to withdraw from continuous assessment. The form that needs to be filled is available at http://www.ehu.eus/eu/web/letrak/idazkaritza. For term courses students can do so within the first 9 weeks of the course, according to the academic calendar of their centre.



Withdrawal from an exam call: Withdrawal from a call will be assessed as “no grade reported” [no presentado/a, ez aurkeztua].

1. In the case of continuous assessment,

a. If the final exam is worth more than 40%: not sitting the exam on the official date of the exam qualifies as an automatic withdrawal from the corresponding call.

b. If the final exam is worth 40% or less: all students can withdraw from a call until at least one month before the date of the end of the teaching schedule of the corresponding course. This withdrawal must be submitted in writing to the instructor responsible for the course.

2. In the case of final assessment, not sitting the exam on the official date of the exam qualifies as an automatic withdrawal from the corresponding call.



The new regulation about assessment can be found here:

http://www.ehu.eus/es/web/estudiosdegrado-gradukoikasketak/ebaluaziorako-arautegia

The Convocatoria Extraordinaria will consist in an exam whose date is set and announced by the Faculty authorities. The conditions for passing this exam will be the same as in the Convocatoria Ordinaria. Students are allowed to repeat only that part they failed and keep the marks from that they passed, provided they got at least 40% of the marks carried by that part.



Independently of the assessment type chosen, students who fail to pass the first exam call will be able to take the same tests as those doing the final evaluation. The teacher may allow students not to repeat a test if they passed it in the first exam call.

• The teacher’s notes will be available in eGela at the beginning of the course.

The references below are available online and/or in the university library:
• Hurford and Heasley (2007) Semantics: A Coursebook, Units 21 to 25 on speech acts and Unit
26 on conversational implicature.
• Levinson (1983) Pragmatics, ch. 3 on conversational implicature and ch. 5 on speech acts.
• Grice (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’.
• Levinson (2000) Presumptive Meanings, on generalised conversational implicature.
• Sperber and Wilson (1986/95) Relevance, on communication and relevance theory generally.

Carston 1988 and 1990, and Wilson and Sperber 1993, or other relevance theory papers might be tackled later in the course.

Bibliografía básica

Allan, K. and K.A. Jaszczolt. eds. 2012. The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics. CUP.

Austin, J. 19752. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard UP.

Clark, B. 2013. Relevance Theory. CUP.

Blakemore, D. 1992. Understanding Utterances. Blackwell.

Blakemore, D. 2004. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. CUP.

Burton-Roberts, N. ed. 2007. Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan.

Carston, R. 1988. ‘Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics’. In R.M. Kempson Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. CUP.

Paper available from https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html#C

Carston, R. 1990. ‘Quantity maxims and generalised implicature’. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/linguistics/publications/wpl/90papers/UCLWPL2_1_Carston

Carston, R. 1998. Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature. In R. Carston and S. Uchida eds. Relevance Theory. Applications and Implications. John Benjamins.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b2e/99a35c1302567d50a32a36e81a4293c5f730.pdf

Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carston, R. 2004. ‘Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction’. In L.R. Horn and G. Ward eds.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4526/11233b9000a92bcccdaed831d4a028251e1b.pdf

Clark, B. 2013. Relevance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cruse, A. 2006. A Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburgh: EUP.

Cummins, C. and N. Katsos 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: OUP.

Davis, S. ed. 1991. Pragmatics: A Reader. OUP.

Escandell, V. 20062. Introducción a la pragmática. Ariel.

Grice, H. P. 1975. ‘Logic and Conversation’. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan eds. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press. Reprinted in H.P. Grice 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard UP.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/studypacks/Grice-Logic.pdf

Grice, H.P. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. In P.Cole (ed) Syntax and Semantics 9. Academic Press. Reprinted in Grice 1989.

http://aardvark.ucsd.edu/language/grice_further_notes.pdf

Bibliografía de profundización

Horn, L. R. and G. Ward 2004. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell.
Huang, Y. 2007. Pragmatics. OUP.
Hurford, J.R. and J. Heasley. 20072. Semantics: A Coursebook. CUP.
Levinson, S.C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Levinson, S.C. 1995. Three levels of meaning. In F. Palmer ed. Grammar and Meaning. CUP.
http://www.mpi.nl/publications/escidoc-66636/@@popup
Levinson, S.C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. The MIT Press.
Noveck, I.A. and D. Sperber. 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan.
Searle, J. 1975a. ‘Indirect Speech Acts’. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan eds. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press. Reprinted in Davis 1991.
Searle, J. 1975b. ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’. In J. Searle 1979. Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP.
Searle, J. 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language 5:1.
https://sites.duke.edu/conversions/files/2014/09/Searle_Illocutionary-Acts.pdf
Soria, B. and E. Romero eds. 2010. Explicit Communication: Robyn Carston’s Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 19952. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Vicente Cruz, B. 2010. The role of pragmatic inferencing in compositional semantics. In B. Soria and E. Romero eds.
Vicente Cruz, B. 2021. La implicatura conversacional. In V. Escandell, J. Amenós and A.K. Ahern eds.
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 1988. Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences. In A. Kasher ed. Pragmatics: Critical Concepts. Routledge.
Paper available from https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html#C
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90: 1-25.
Paper available from https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html#C
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 2000. Truthfulness and relevance. UCLWPL 12: 215-54.
Paper available from https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html#C

Revistas

Cognition, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Semantics, Lingua, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Pragmatics and Cognition.

Direcciones web

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/
Relevance Theory Online Bibliographic Service by Francisco Yus http://www.ua.es/personal/francisco.yus/rt.html