English 420 : Topics in Pragmatics

Syllabus for Fall 2017

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-f17 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.

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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.

Recommended

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

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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.

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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. Please read a unit in Section A before we meet to discuss the topic in class. You should read Unit A1 and A2 before we meet on Tuesday, September 12. If you don’t yet have the book, please borrow one from a fellow student or consult the copy in the reference section of College Library.

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. Your responses to the first week’s two readings are due on Tuesday, September 12.

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. If your team presents two different Exploration projects and both are graded at B or above, members of that team will gain 5% extra credit.

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 17 and is due on October 19. It will be based on the topics we have covered in units 1-6. The final test will be available on December 12 and is due on December 15. 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.

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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.

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

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.

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Course Outline

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