Program
Mandag 3/5: Semantik – Ole Togeby og Peter Widell
Tirsdag 4/5:
Pragmatik - Jakob Steensig
Onsdag 5/5: Morfologi - Henrik Jørgensen og Sten Vikner (og Torben Thrane ?)
Torsdag 6/5: Fonologi og fonetik - Ocke Bohn
Fredag 7/5: Syntaks - Torben Thrane og Sten Vikner
Detaljer om de enkelte kursuselementer følger snarest. Brugernavn og kodeord til kursusteksterne udsendes til alle tilmeldte deltagere umiddelbart efter tilmeldingsfristens udløb.
Kursuselementet Pragmatik
v/Jakob Steensig, tirsdag den 4/5
This course element aims at giving participants the ability to argue for their choice of data, methods, analyses, and conclusions in a way that includes relevant considerations of language in use. Therefore, the focus will be on the relationship between theories about language in use and their empirical applications/consequences. This is in line with the, mainly Anglo-Saxon, "pragmatic" view on pragmatics as the study of language in use, which we will use as a point of departure.
I have chosen mainly "classical texts", which present some fundamental notions in pragmatics, but which also contain examples or analyses, which can inform discussions of practical, empirical work.
Preparation
Apart from reading the texts – to which you will find a short introduction below – I will ask you to prepare a short (five to ten minutes) presentation, according to the following guidelines:
Pick a piece of data from your project, short enough for everybody to digest it immediately and on the spot. If you have not collected data for your project yet, you may want to use data from other people's research, which is compatible with what you want to do. If your project is so theoretical that you do not use empirical data, you should find an instance of language in use which will exemplify one of your theoretical points. Try, as explicitly and simply as possible, to describe relevant pragmatic parameters which can be used to characterize the piece as an instance of language in use: For instance, relationship between locution and illocution, types of speech acts or activities, breaches or uses of Gricean maxims, cohesion and coherence, recipient orientedness, discursive features, interactional relations between utterances, etc.Your characterization can either be just oral, or you can write down a few keywords, but it is important that you present it in a way that gives the rest of us the possiblity of discussing your characterizations.
Texts
To some extent I shall in my presentation use a system for describing language use, developed by Hans Arndt. Those of you who read Danish could acquire and read the easily accessible introduction to these thoughts in Arndt, Hans (2007) Talehandling - og anden sprogbrug. København: Dansklærerforeningens forlag.
The texts below are the ones that you will be expected to have read for the course element and which are part of the course materials:
- Austin, J. L. (1971) ‘Performative-constative’, in Searle (ed.) The Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 13-22.
This is a short version of Austin's argument from his famous (1962) How to Do Things with Words. It argues that utterances are always carrying out an action, so there is no escape from "doing things with words", or from pragmatics! - Brown, Gillian & George Yule (1983) ‘4. ‘Staging’ and the representation of discourse structure’. in Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125-152, and Brown, Gillian & George Yule (1983) ‘5. Information structure’, in Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 153-189.
In looking for a good, brief presentation of some main pragmatic principles for text organization, I keep coming back to these two chapters. - Grice, H.P. (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’, in Cole & Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Academic Press, New York, 41-58.
A classical piece, in which Grice presents his Cooperation Principle, the connected maxims and the whole idea (and system) for implicatures. - Heritage, John (1984) ‘8. Conversation Analysis’, in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 233-314.
Conversation Analysis (CA) takes a different view on what action is. This is relevant to thinking and practice within pragmatics. This is one of the clearest expositions of CA, with both theoretical outlook and examples.
Extra stuff, that I may refer to and which you may want to read, before or after the course, includes:
- Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson (1987): Universals of Politeness. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, especially pp. 55-84.
A beautifully laid out system for describing how pragmatic and social factors influence in predictable ways on the actual form of specific speech acts. - Goffman, Erving (1981) ‘Footing’, in Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 124-159.
It's fun to read Goffman. His examples are juicy. This is his presentation of the important concept of "footing", which has later been developed, also under different names, such as framing and contextualization. - Halliday, M.A.K & Ruqaiya Hasan (1976) ‘Chapter 1: Introduction’ in Cohesion in English. London: Longman, especially 1-30.
A short presentation of a system for analyzing cohesion in texts. I wanted to include it in the readings but it became too much. - Hymes, Dell (1972) ‘Models of the interaction of language and social life’, in Gumperz & Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 35-71.
Hymes' "Ethnography of Communication" is the "most pragmatic" approach to language. This is a both practical and theoretical introduction. - Searle, John R. (1976) ‘A classification of illocutionary acts’. Language in Society 5: 1-23.
A rather technical account of Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary (or Speech) acts. Behind lies the basic idea, that all utterances are both a locution (the contents of the utterance) and an illocution (the action that the utterance carries out); the rest is just formulas and definitions.
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