Welcome to
LING904 Pragmatics

Macquarie University Online Teaching Facility

Pragmatics is a perspective and set of approaches and methods which have coalesced relatively recently within Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. You will find that pragmatics has a great deal to contribute to the understanding of how we make meaning in social contexts. The fields to which pragmatics has been applied are many: second and foreign language teaching and learning, cross-cultural communication, workplace and professional-client interaction, the discourse of the law and dispute resolution, translating and interpreting, speech therapy - these are a few of the areas of activity whose insight into their own communicative basis, patterns and styles have been enriched in recent years by the perspectives of pragmatics. Throughout this course, we hope - above all else - that you will see ways of using pragmatics to shed light on problems and issues within your own area of work and interest.

Topics explored during the course include developments in speech act theory; conversational maxims, relevance and implicature; activity types and communicative events; cognitive theory: scripts, schemata, frames, genre; sociocultural sources of thought; presupposition and mutual knowledge; the pragmatics of politeness and 'face'; turn-taking and conversational analysis; communication strategies: acknowledgment, clarification, repair and alignment; power, ideology and critical discourse analysis; contrastive pragmatics: anthropological and ethnographic perspectives and cross-cultural communication; applications of pragmatics in: second language learning and teaching, literary stylistics, conflict resolution/mediation, workplace communication, and the development of pragmatic competence in normal and disordered contexts.

Enquiries regarding external study should be directed to:
Jill Murray
+61 2 9850 7856
Jill.Murray@ling.mq.edu.au

Enquiries regarding internal study should be directed to
Stephen Moore
+61 2 9850 8742
Stephen.Moore@ling.mq.edu.au

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