Basics of Communication and Pragmatics

Published: Thursday, 06 August 2015 09:40

The discipline is read for first-year students of a master course (1st semester). The total working intensiveness amounts to 72 academic hours including class work (18 lecture hours, 18 seminar hours) - 36 hours, self-instruction work – 36 hours. ECTS equals 2. While mastering the given discipline students are to take a credit.

The main goal of the discipline is to provide students with profound knowledge of Basics of Communication and Pragmatics. The discipline aims to familiarize students with the range of theories in Communication and Pragmatics, Discourse Studies. It also aims to provide practical analytical skills and methodologies for analyzing spoken, written and visual texts of different genres. It aims to cover the major areas in pragmatic theory, to introduce the latest developments in those areas, and to apply the theory to real data.This course considers how meanings are constructed in communication.

The discipline is organized so that it focuses in turn on various components that are central to communication.We focus on topics, such as referring expression and presuppositions, formal language system and the border between semantics/grammar and pragmatics.Relevant frameworks include schema theory, Grice and Relevance Theory. We also focus on speaker’s intention and description of speech acts or pragmatic acts, the interpersonal dynamics of interaction, and politeness and impoliteness theories, the application of pragmatics to cross-cultural situations.The emphasis of the course is on the application of pragmatic theory to 'real' data, and how that application affords insights into both the data and the theory.

The discipline “Basics of Communication and Pragmatics” emphasizes the integration of theory with practical methods.Hands-on practical work with texts is an important element of the course.While mastering this course students are to develop an understanding of the relationship between language and meaning on the word, sentence and utterance level; to learn essential terms of the course and be able to observe pragmatic theories about how language users achieve their goals in verbal interaction with others.

Having completed this course students will be able to apply theoretical knowledge of linguistic description, communication and pragmatics in scientific and experimental work and to carry out self-sufficient scientific research.

The most important issues students are to cover while studying the given discipline are: Intercultural Communication, Critical Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Fundamentals of Meaning, Presumptive Meanings, Speech acts, The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, Semantic Analysis, Criticisms of Pragmatics, Deixis, and Pragmatics of written texts