Pragmatics

LANG 3330AED

Course Guide

PRAGMATICS

LANG 3330AED

Course Guide

PRAGMATICS

Course Start Date

Spr 2025

Course Level

3000

Length in Terms

1 term

Credits

3

Language

English

Fees ($) (including lab fees)

5,475

Future Terms

Quota and Schedule

Course Start Date	Course Level	Length in Terms	Credits	Language	Fees ($) (including lab fees)	Future Terms
Spr 2025	3000	1 term	3	English	5,475

Quota and Schedule

Course Coordinator:

Dr Patrick Lee, MA (HKBU); MA (CityU); MBA (University of Leicester, UK); PhD (Newcastle University, UK); Chartered Linguist (CIOL)

Course Developer:

Dr Han Yang

Aims

This course aims to outline basic concepts in pragmatics, and various pragmatics theories such as Gricean Cooperative Principle, Politeness Theory, etc. are introduced. LANG 3330AED Pragmatics also aims to facilitate students to examine the way in which their experiences are conceptualised.

Contents

Meaning in context
We study the pragmatic properties of utterances and examine how the utterance gives rise to pragmatic force(s) in a given context. We also see how the hearer generally manages to understand reasonably accurately the utterance meaning in the way the speaker intends.
Meaning in interaction
We study the way in which meaning is generated, and see how shared knowledge of the world provides grounds for our understanding of implicit meaning. We also discuss the problems associated with the conventional analysis of presupposition.
Indirectness and politeness
We distinguish various sets of politeness phenomenon and study the way in which politeness is used as a universal pragmatic strategy. We also examine different types of politeness strategy from our observation of day-to-day language interaction, and identify the cross-linguistic similarities.
Meaning and imagination
We turn our attention to the relationship between the two major disciplines in the study of meaning. We see how the social and mental realities of meaning are encoded in the language and how we need to take into account social, psychological and cognitive factors of both the speaker and hearer in their interaction in order to arrive at an adequate pragmatic description of language phenomena.

Learning support

Four two-hour tutorials and one two-hour supplementary lecture.

Assessment

Assignment 1 (25%)

Assignment 2 (25%)

A two-hour examination (50%) is to be held at the end of the course.

Online Requirement

Students are required to submit assignments via the Online Learning Environment (OLE).

Set Book(s)

There are no set textbooks for the course.

References

Austin, John Langshaw (1962) How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clark, Billy (2022) Pragmatics: The Basics. Oxon: Routledge.

Grundy, P. (1995; 2020) Doing Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold; London: Routledge.

Levinson, Stephen (2003) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, Jenny (2013) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. New York: Routledge.