The summer is nearing its end. I just finished the first draft syllabus for my pragmatics course this fall. I hope to condense some of the introduction to basic concepts, primarily by reigning in my tendency to get caught up in digressions. This will give me time to cover some interesting topics under current investigation, which I am quite excited about. We’ll see how it goes.
This is a dress rehearsal of sorts for the 6 week pragmatics course that I will be teaching during the LSA Summer Linguistics Institute 2005 next summer. I will only have twelve 90 minute sessions, so that version will have to be even more concentrated.
Kai!
It’s great to get a sneak peek at your plans for the fall.
I taught pragmatics for two-weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia, this July. Many of the students were linguists, but from different traditions than mine. Almost none of them had heard of conversational implicatures before the course began. Nonetheless, on days 5 and 6 (of 6), we were able to fruitfully discuss intrusive conversational implicatures of the sort that Levinson highlights throughout his book Presumptive Meanings. I mainly called on material from chapter 1, sections 4 and 5, and chapter 3. I gave copies of these sections to especially interested students; it’s a reasonable amount of reading. The book is available from MIT CogNet (subscriber only).
Levinson’s stuff could form a useful introduction to the subsection called ‘Embedded implicatures’ on your course syllabus. Levinson makes initial connections with non-monotonic logic and layered DRT (without using that phrase, which I think was invented later on).
This stuff is a great way to round out a discussion of how best to balance semantic and pragmatic explanations. One can strike a perfect balance with, say, cardinal determiners, and then thow everything off balance with Levinson!
—Chris
August 19th, 2004, at 6:18 pm #I have posted a link to your announcement in my blog too. I think many will like to see the syllabus.
August 20th, 2004, at 12:50 am #Just wanted to let you know that one of your links on the syllabus doesn’t work:
ANAND, Pranav & NEVINS, Andrew: 2004. “Shifty Operators in Changing
October 8th, 2004, at 11:31 am #Contexts.” URL http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/shiftyoperators.
pdf. SALT 14 Talk.
Thanks, Chris. I have corrected the syllabus and added a note on the course website.
October 8th, 2004, at 1:36 pm #