Phonology and Pragmatics

The Pragmatics component deals with pragmatic theory, with a special focus on relevance theory. Central topics are the division between Semantics and Pragmatics, the relationship between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional content, the relationship between explicit and implicit communication, and the relationship between descriptive and interpretive use of language.

The Phonology part of the course provides further insight into phonological problems and modern methods of analysis. A principal issue is the relationship between the different forces that are active in phonological processes, and the presumed universal motivations for these, as they are analyzed within Optimality Theory.

The goal is to enable students to work independently with pragmatic and phonological problems, to make use of literature within the fields and to perform their own analyses.

Lectures and group instructions. More on assessment: Obligatory exercises must be approved before students are allowed to take the take-home exam. The size of the exercises must be between 8-12 typed A4-pages each (line spacing 1.5). The size of the take-home exam depends partly on the subject, but is usually between 8-15 typed A4-pages (line spacing 1.5).