Experimental Pragmatics

Instructor(s): Gregory Ward and William S. Horton

Description:
The emerging field of experimental pragmatics combines an interest in the theoretical complexities of language use with the experimental methodologies of psycholinguistics. This course will present a broad survey of recent work in this area that has attempted to apply the methods of experimental psychology to classic issues in theoretical pragmatics. Each class session will include both theoretical and experimental readings on topics such as reference, implicature, and speech acts. These topics wrestle with the relationship between the sentence, as an abstract object with phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties assigned by the grammar of the language, and the utterance, as the concrete realization of that sentence with properties inherited from consideration of the discourse situation. In general, the course will be organized primarily around discussion of the assigned readings, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research proposal relevant to issues in language use.

Prerequisites:
Any introductory course in semantics, pragmatics, or psycholinguistics.