Course Description
‘Do you regret killing him?’
Suppose that you are a defendant in a murder case, and that you are asked this question, by the judge. If you haven’t admitted guilt, you know that you cannot answer the question with standard answer words, i.e., ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Either of those answers would mean that you validate the judge’s assumption that you are guilty. This accusation is implied by the question. A theory of meaning must integrate the assumptions of the participants in a conversation, and explain how they are conveyed. This course aims at modeling the role of the context of utterance in the construction of linguistic meaning; it does so by—but not exclusively by—exploring the relation between truth-conditional and non truth-conditional content. We elucidate the notions of common ground, discourse and utterance, and we concentrate on a small number of phenomena: presupposition and not-at-issue content, implicatures, focus and (maybe) questions.
Area Tags: Pragmatics
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 9:00am – 10:20am
Location: ILC S405
Instructor: Vincent Homer
Vincent Homer studied Classics and Philosophy at ENS-Paris and the Sorbonne. He received a PhD in Linguistics from UCLA in 2011; the title of his dissertation was ‘Polarity and Modality’. Currently Homer is an associate professor at UMass Amherst and a researcher at the Institut Jean-Nicod, specializing in formal semantics.
