English 420 : Topics in Pragmatics

Syllabus for Fall 2015

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 - 3:45 PM in 2637 Humanities

Instructor	Assignments
Required Materials	Assessment and Grading
Aims of the Course	Course Outline

Professor Richard F Young
7163 Helen C White Hall
Office hours: Wednesdays, 9:00 - 11:00 AM or by appointment

E-mail: rfyoung at wisc dot edu
Home Page: www.wisc.edu/english/rfyoung

Class E-mail List

Use the class e-mail list as a public bulletin board for discussions about the class. Send your messages to engl420-1-f15 at lists dot wisc dot edu. In order for you to receive messages from the e-mail list, your e-mail address must be in the Registrar's database. If you do not receive messages from the list, you should activate a NetID account (wisc.edu e-mail) or register an existing e-mail account.

Required Materials

	Archer, D., Aijmer, K., & Wichmann, A. (2012). Pragmatics: An advanced resource book for students. Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-415-49787-9. This book is available for purchase at the University Bookstore. Useful online resources are available for this title here.
	Thirty-four readings are available from my English_420 folder on Box here. These are the full versions of the extracts included in the textbook.

These books are available for use at the Memorial Library Reference area, 262 Memorial Library
	Cummings, L. (Ed.). (2010). The pragmatics encyclopedia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Call number: P99.4 P72 P7395 2013
	Horn, L. R., & Ward, G. L. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of pragmatics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Call number: P99.4 P72 H35 2004
	Mey, J. (Ed.). (1998). Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (1st ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Call number: P99.4 P72 C62 1998

Aims of the course

This is an introduction to pragmatics for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates in the English department, students pursuing a Ph.D. in second language acquisition, and interested students from other departments.

Pragmatics is the study of the relationship between the meaning of an utterance and the context in which the utterance is produced. We normally think of people using language to produce utterances, though the act of production involves not only words and grammar but also vocal prosody, gesture, gaze, and bodily stance. The context of production is also much grander than the time and place of utterance and includes the physical, spatial, temporal, social, interactional, institutional, political, and historical circumstances in which a person produces an utterance. By ‘utterance’ and ‘context’ we name systems of interconnection among very many features, and the study of the relationship between utterance and context is not to be undertaken lightly. Nonetheless it is a study that for centuries has been of great interest to philosophers, linguists, semioticians, and psychologists. And even if you don’t want to focus on pragmatics as a field of academic study, it’s worth considering a few questions that we will ask and try to answer in this course:

I know the kind of actions I can perform with my body and with tools I use, but what kind of actions can I perform with my words?
Sometimes, I am in conversation with somebody and, although we both know exactly the meaning of every word, I still don’t get what the other person is driving at. Whose fault is it? What am I missing?
I know some people who are forever saying please and thank you, just like my parents taught me when I was a child. And then there are some other people I know who rarely say please or thank you, and I know my parents would say they are not being polite, but nobody else seems to bother. Why is that?
Why did the defense attorney object when the prosecutor asked the defendant when he had stopped abusing his wife?
Say “It’s cold in here” and mean “It’s warm in here”. Can you do it?—And what are you doing as you do it? And is there only one way of doing it?

That last question was asked by a philosopher. Asking and answering questions like these is not only what we should do as students and scholars, it is also a matter of practical communication—especially communication among people from different social and cultural backgrounds. If you decide to take this course, I hope it will not only be one more step on the road to an academic qualification, but it will also be a means to make us all better communicators.

Assignments

Attendance and Readings. You are expected to attend class regularly and to complete weekly the assigned readings in their full form, not just the extracts in the textbook as well as additional materials in the online textbook resources available here and from the recommended reference books.

Extension Tasks. Each student is expected to carry out extension tasks from Section B of the textbook based on each reading. I encourage you to discuss these tasks with fellow students, but each of you should submit your own assignment. You should read not only the short extracts in the textbook but also the complete article or chapter available for download from the English_420 folder on Box here. Your written responses to a given reading are due on Tuesday of the week following discussion of that topic. Your responses to all extension tasks should total between two and three single-sided pages in one week’s assignment. Please submit your responses in a hard copy to me.

Explorations. On 9 occasions throughout the course, a team of 3-4 students will present a lesson based on a task in Section C (Explorations) in the textbook. This assignment involves conducting your own research and reporting it to the class. You should plan a presentation to the class to last no more than 45 minutes. Make sure that your presentation includes an introduction to the topic of your research, a body in which you describe what you have done and why you did it, and a conclusion in which you describe what you have learned from doing the research. Please communicate with your audience as effectively as possible by good organization, effective use of visual aids, an engaging style of delivery, and meaningful interaction with your audience. The team grade will be determined by the votes of me and the students in your audience on a Presentation Evaluation Form downloadable here.

Tests. Your knowledge and interpretation of the readings and lectures will be assessed by two tests. The tests will begin in class and may be completed at home and each student should write his or her own test. The midterm test will be available on October 13 and is due on October 15. It will be based on the topics we have covered in units 1-6. The final test will be available on December 8 and is due on December 10. It will be based on the topics covered in units 7-12. The four questions in the Midterm will be taken from each of the Explorations sections in the textbook. (Question 1 will be taken from Unit C1, question 2 will be taken from Unit C2, question 3 from C3, and question 4 from C4). The five questions on the Final will be taken from Exploration units C5, C6, C7, C8, and C9. You must choose to answer four questions, each of which will be scored out of 25 points for a maximum of 100 points on each test.

Authorship. Some of your assignments for this course involve integrating information from published sources into your own writing and most assignments involve work done on your own. When you are working on your own, you need to be careful to avoid plagiarism, collusion, and complicity. These terms are defined as follows. Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s ideas or work, wittingly or unwittingly, as your own; collusion means copying from another’s work; and complicity means allowing another student to practice collusion, i.e., to copy your own work. For advice on what sources you should document and how to document them, consult Quoting and Paraphrasing Sources on the Writing Center website.

Assessment and Grading

I will award letter grades for the Extension Tasks and Explorations and percent scores for the two tests. The meanings and equivalencies of the grades follow.

Grade name	Percent cutoff	Letter grade equivalent	Narrative
A+	100	100%	Excellent. Work goes well beyond the requirements of the assignment.
A	93	96%	Demonstrates full understanding of all concepts; creatively applies theories and methods to new problems in the field.
AB	85	88%	Intermediate grade
B	77	80%	Demonstrates understanding of all concepts; can correctly apply theories and methods to new problems in the field.
BC	69	72%	Intermediate grade
C	61	64%	Demonstrates understanding of some but not all concepts; some errors in applying theory and methods to new problems in the field.
D	53	56%	Demonstrates understanding of a limited number of concepts; many errors in applying theory and methods to new problems in the field.
F	0	0%	Lack of understanding of concepts; not capable of applying theories and methods to new problems in the field. Assignment not completed by deadline.

The final grade for the course will take into account grades awarded on all assignments in the following proportions.

Midterm Test	25%
Final Test	25%
Extension Tasks	30%
Explorations	20%

Incompletes. The grade of "Incomplete" will only be used for a student who has carried the course with a passing grade until near the end of the semester and then, because of illness or other unusual and substantial cause beyond his/her control, is unable to complete the remaining assignments.

Course Outline

Date	Topic	Readings	Explorations
September 3	A1: The origins of pragmatics	Nerlich, B. (2010). History of pragmatics. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 192-195). Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge. Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London & New York: Longman. Chapter 1, ‘Introduction.’	Richard
September 8 & 10	A2: Research methods in pragmatics	Kasper, G. (2008). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Culture, communication and politeness theory (2nd ed., pp. 279-303). London: Continuum. Van der Henst, J.-B., & Sperber, D. (2004). Testing the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance. In I. A. Noveck & D. Sperber (Eds.), Experimental pragmatics (pp. 141-171). Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohnen, T. (2009). Historical corpus pragmatics: Focus on speech acts and texts. In A. H. Jucker, D. Schreier & M. Hundt (Eds.), Corpora: Pragmatics and discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14-18 May 2008 (pp. 13-36). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.	C1: Choosing, transcribing and annotating a dataset Mariah, Devan, and Zengning
September 15 & 17	A3: The semantic-pragmatic interface	Jaszczolt, K. M. (2010). Semantics-pragmatics interface. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 428-432). Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge. Stalnaker, R. (1974). Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. K. Munitz & P. K. Unger (Eds.), Semantics and philosophy (pp. 197-214). New York: New York University Press. Enfield, N. J. (2003). The definition of WHAT-d’you-call-it: Semantics and pragmatics of recognitional deixis. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(1), 101-117. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00066-8
September 22 & 24	A4: Speech acts: Doing things with words	Manes, J., & Wolfson, N. (1981). The compliment formula. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational routine (pp. 115-132). The Hague: Mouton. Jucker, A. H. (2009). Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory: The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611-1635. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2009.02.004 Eisenstein, M., & Bodman, J. W. (1993). Expressing gratitude in American English. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 64-81). New York: Oxford University Press.	C2: Exploring routinized speech acts using corpora Cathy, Lynn, and Jiahui
September 29 & October 1	A5: Implicature	Grice, H. P. (1989). Logic and conversation. In H. P. Grice (Ed.), Studies in the way of words (pp. 22-57). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leech, G. N. (1981). Semantics: The study of meaning (2nd ed.). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Chapter 16 ‘Semantics and Pragmatics.’ Wilson, D. (2010). Relevance theory. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 393-399). Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge.	C3: Testing for implicatures Hadis, Joy, and Cris
October 6 & 8	A6: Pragmatics and the structure of discourse	Tsui, A. B. M. (1994). English conversation. Oxford, UK & New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 2, ‘The Structure of Conversation.’ Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse analysis: The sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Chapter 9 ‘On the Surface of Discourse: Prefaces and Alignments.’ McCarthy, M. (2003). Talking back: “Small” interactional response tokens in everyday conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(1), 33-63. doi: 10.1207/S15327973RLSI3601_3	C4: The organization of discourse structure Katie, Glenn, and Kunihiko
October 13 & 15	Midterm test
October 20 & 22	A7: Pragmatic markers	Diani, G. (2004). The discourse functions of I don’t know in English conversation. In K. Aijmer & A.-B. Stenström (Eds.), Discourse patterns in spoken and written corpora (pp. 157-172). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gilquin, G. (2008). Hesitation markers among EFL learners: Pragmatic deficiency or difference? In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: A mutualistic entente (pp. 119-149). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rühlemann, C. (2007). Conversation in context: A corpus-driven approach. London: Continuum. Chapter 6 ‘Discourse Management Phenomena.’	C5: Pragmatic markers: Further explorations Neal, Risa, Kellie, and Anna
October 27 & 29	A8: Pragmatics, facework, and (im)politeness	O’Driscoll, J. (2007). Brown and Levinson’s face: How it can—and can’t—help us to understand interaction across cultures. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(4), 463-492. doi: 10.1515/IP.2007.024 Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 10 ‘Politic Behaviour and Politeness Within a Theory of Social Practice.’ Culpeper, J., Bousfield, D., & Wichmann, A. (2003). Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(10-11), 1545-1579. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00118-2	C6: Facework and im/politeness Luisa and Junjing
November 3 & 5	A9: Pragmatics, prosody, and gesture	Mennen, I. (2007). Phonological and phonetic influences in non-native intonation. In J. Trouvain & U. Gut (Eds.), Non-native prosody: Phonetic description and teaching practice (pp. 53-76). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Wichmann, A. (2004). The intonation of please-requests: A corpus-based study. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(9), 1521-1549. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2004.03.003 Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 5 ‘Pragmalinguistics: Three biological codes.’	C7: Prosody and non-verbal communication Jake, Maggie, and TJ
November 10 & 12	A10: Cross-cultural pragmatics	Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Chapter 3 ‘Cross-cultural pragmatics and different cultural values.’ Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 91-112. doi: 10.1093/applin/4.2.91 Argyle, M. (1988). Bodily communication (2nd ed.). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Chapter 4 ‘Cultural differences in bodily communication.’	C8: Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics Carmen, Caelan, and Zack
November 17, 19, & 24	A11: Historical pragmatics	Culpeper, J. (2010). Historical pragmatics. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 188-192). Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge. Kohnen, T. (2009). Historical corpus pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, D. Schreier & M. Hundt (Eds.), Corpora: Pragmatics and discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29), Ascona, Switzerland, 14-18 May 2008 (pp. 13-36). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Taavitsainen, I., & Jucker, A. H. (2008). “Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever”: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In A. H. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), Speech acts in the history of English (pp. 195-228). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins
December 1 & 3	A12: Pragmatics and power	van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 159-177. doi: 10.1177/1461445606059565 Harris, S. (1995). Pragmatics and power. Journal of Pragmatics, 23(2), 117-135. doi: 10.1016/0378-2166(94)00008-3 Haworth, K. (2006). The dynamics of power and resistance in police interview discourse. Discourse & Society, 17(6), 739–759. doi: 10.1177/0957926506068430	C9: Power Ashton and Carolyn
December 8 & 10	Final test

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