Course Descriptions

Most work in pragmatics is built around influential idealized models that treat conversations as small-scale, cooperative activities that are organized around shared information, questions, and goals. Our plan for this course is to start by getting a firm grip on these models by reading some of the classics, and then to look at a range of recent and in-progress work that attempt to lift some of the standard idealizations.

Some questions we’ll consider: How do our models have to be adjusted to make sense of conversations with aims other than efficient information exchange? What is the point of small talk, and how does it work? What about online communication, or other situations when we’re communicating with large, diverse, shifting groups of interlocutors? What about when things get less cooperative? What about the use of language to construct our social identities? What about situations in which differences in perspective are especially important? What are the psychological states and processes being modeled by our pragmatic theories, anyway, and how do they change in these different contexts?

At the end of the semester, we’re planning to have a two-day conference involving some of the authors of the papers we’ve read. The plan is for this to be at Rutgers on May 12–13. (That’s the last week of CUNY classes, and the week after the last week of classes at Rutgers and Columbia.)