Overview

This is the first in a two-course sequence designed to provide a foundation in the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic meaning. The first quarter focuses primarily on pragmatics: those aspects of meaning that arise from the way that speakers put language to use, rather than through the formal properties of the linguistic system itself, which is the domain of semantics. However, a central goal of the course will be to begin to develop an understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics, by exploring empirical phenomena in which contextual and conventional aspects of meaning interact in complex but regular and well-defined ways, and by learning analytical techniques that allow us to tease these two aspects of linguistics meaning apart.

Assignments

The written work for the course will consist of weekly reaction papers, three or four larger and more comprehensive written assignments, and a take-home final. The reaction papers should choose one article from the list we will be reading each week and provide a one page overview of its central points: what is the main issue that it addresses, what are the core proposals, and what arguments are brought to bear to support the proposals?

You are encouraged to discuss the assignments with each other, but the final analysis and write-up should be done individually. You are also expected to do all the reading for the course, and as there will be a fair amount of it, you should make time accordingly.

Evaluation

Your evaluation will be based on performance on the assignments and participation in class.

Textbook

Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. (Available at the Seminary Coop.)

The Levinson book should be available at the Seminary Coop. We will in addition have a fair amount of reading from primary literature, which will be available for downloading from the class website. The classroom discussion will presuppose familiarity with the text, so it will be important to do the reading in advance.

The Plan

The following is a rough week-by-week plan for the course as of August 23; please note that we may end up diverging from it a bit depending on the discussion and interests of the class. I have listed the chapters of Levinson that correspond to each chunk here; please see the class website for other assigned articles to read (that will provide the basis for your reaction papers) and for optional background and supplementary readings.

• Week 1: Foundational issues
  The distinction and division of labor between semantics and pragmatics: where do different aspects of meaning come from, and how can we tell them apart?
  

  • REQUIRED: Levinson ch. 1, Grice 1957
  • OPTIONAL: Kearns 2000, ch. 2, Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990, ch. 1 and ch. 2
  
  Note: The first reaction paper will be due on Thursday, October 1.
  
  

• Weeks 2-3: Speech Acts
  Things we do with words, and the relation between propositional content and meaning. Indirect speech acts, illocutionary force, and performative utterances.
  

  • REQUIRED: Levinson ch. 5, Austin 1956, Searle 1965, 1975a, 1975b, Strawson 1964, Sadock 2004 (preprint)
  • OPTIONAL: Stalnaker 1978
  
  

• Weeks 4-5: Presupposition
  The relation between sentence meaning and prior context: what conditions on our background knowledge does (the use of?) a particular sentence impose? Presupposition projection, accommodation and semantic vs. pragmatic theories of presupposition.
  

  • REQUIRED: Levinson ch. 4, Stalnaker 1974, 1999, Lewis 1979, Karttunen 1973
  • OPTIONAL: Stalnaker 2002, Abbott 2000
    
  • ACCOMMODATION READINGS: Abbott 2006, von Fintel 2006, Thomason et al. 2006, Frazier 2006
  
  

• Weeks 6-7: Conversational Implicature
  The relation between the truth-conditional and non-truth conditional aspects of a speaker's intended meaning: how much follows from general principles of communication, cooperation and informativity, and how much of this can be sytematically explained in terms of a fixed set of principles or maxims?
  

  • REQUIRED: Levinson ch. 3, Grice 1975 Morgan 1978, Sadock 1978, Horn 1990
    
  • OPTIONAL: Horn 1984, Green 1990
  
  

• Weeks 8: Conventional Implicature and multidimensionality
  Meaning that is neither non-truth conditional nor part of the "main" assertion: evidence for the distinction, its relation to presupposition and projection, and ways of capturing it.
  

  • REQUIRED: Karttunen and Peters 1979, Potts 2007, Roberts et al. 2009
  
  

• Weeks 9-10: Reference
  The relation between words and the world.

  • REQUIRED: Levinson ch. 2, sections of Abbott (in press), Russell 1905, Strawson 1950, Donnellan 1966