Course title: Pragmatics
Instructor: Mateusz-Milan Stanojević
ECTS credits: 5
Language: English
Semester: 9th (winter)
Status: elective
Form of Instruction: 1 lecture + 2 seminars per week
Examination: written
Course description: This course deals with various issues in pragmatics, such as illocution and perlocution, various types of communicative interaction, speech acts, text functions, etc., with special emphasis on their relevance in the translation process.
Objectives: The aim of this course is for the students to acquire basic theoretical competences in pragmatics, and skills to recognize pragmatic issues in practice. This will enable them to develop skills to recognize various pragmatic notions in stretches of speech, and deal with them in translation.
| Week | Topic |
| 1 | Introduction, syllabus, definition of pragmatics |
| 2 | Functions of language. The goals of translation. |
| 3 | Context and background knowledge: general issues. Cultural differences and translation: examples. |
| 4 | Context and background knowledge in written and spoken texts: presupposition. A cultural view of presupposition in translation. |
| 5 | Context and background knowledge: cohesion and coherence. Manipulating cohesion and coherence for pragmatic effect. |
| 6 | Context and background knowledge: deixis. Social deixis and the T/V distinction in Croatian and English. Translational issues. |
| 7 | Politeness. Positive and negative face. Differences between Croatian and English. Translational issues. |
| 8 | Revision |
| 9 | Speech acts: background. Felicity conditions. Possible consequences for translation. |
| 10 | Speech acts and society. A cross-cultural view: finding differences between English and Croatian. |
| 11 | The cooperative principle: background. Theory and examples of maxims. Flouting and violating maxims. |
| 12 | The cooperative principle: examples and their translation. |
| 13 | Textual differences: achieving pragmatic effect in different types of text. Pragmatic effect and functions of language: recognition and translation. Examples, discussion, problems. |
| 14 | Discourse analysis, pragmatics and culture. The translator as a cultural mediator. |
| 15 | Revision. |
