Course Description
This course provides an advanced overview of linguistic pragmatics, focusing on meaning beyond the sentence level. As a vehicle for exploring a range of formal theories and frameworks in discourse-level pragmatics, we focus on the topic of force: its realizations in natural language at the sentence/utterance level, and its effect on interpretation in discourse. Empirically, we focus on linguistic forms of force marking and force-level operators beyond what is found in canonical unmarked declaratives, including a wide range of cases where there is an apparent mismatch between form and interpretation: for example, non-canonical questions, non-sentential forms and forms with idiosyncratic force marking, etc., as well as cases where sentence-level morphology (such as discourse particles) or intonational marking (such as rising intonation in many languages) impacts interpretation beyond the apparent force.
Area Tags: Pragmatics, Semantics, Discourse, Linguistic Frameworks
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 9:00am – 10:20am
Location: ILC S405
Instructors: María Biezma & Kyle Rawlins
María Biezma is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department and in Spanish and Portuguese at LLC at UMass Amherst. Her research interests lie in linguistics, in particular in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. Her focus is in understanding the richness and complexity of the mechanisms that interact in the production of semantic and pragmatic meanings, bringing together semantics, pragmatics, discourse theory, syntax and psycholinguistics.
Kyle Rawlins is an Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science Department department at Johns Hopkins University. His research is in natural language semantics and pragmatics, and is often interdisciplinary work involving the integration of theoretical linguistics, computational/mathematical modeling, and crowd-sourced/experimental data.
