Pragmatics is the field of linguistics that is concerned with usage of language and how utterances are influenced by context and knowledge of the participants in conversation. The main topics of the seminar will be deixis, implicatures, presuppositions and speech acts, i.e. we will have a look at why sentences like 1 and 2 sound strange even though they are grammatically correct. (1) Come over there please! (2) Fred’s children are hippies, and he has no children. In order to require the credit points, active participation as well as a presentation on one of the topics are required. |