Course title: Pragmalinguistics
Department: Department of English
ECTS credits: 5
Semester: winter
Course coordinator: Professor Irena Zovko Dinković
Instructor: Ivana Sklepić, assistant
Form of teaching: 1 lecture, 2 seminars
Language: English
Status: Elective course
Exam: none

Student obligations:
– regular class attendance and active participation in class work and discussions
– preparation for classes and completion of assigned tasks
– continuous work with course materials
– individual student presentation accompanied by a short written paper – topic to be chosen in agreement with the course instructor

The aim of this course is to enable students to master the basic concepts of pragmalinguistics on both a theoretical and practical level. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to read pragmalinguistic texts independently, will acquire fundamental skills for designing pragmalinguistic research, and will be able to informally recognize pragmalinguistic phenomena in everyday communication, which can serve as a starting point for raising awareness of their own communication skills.

Week-by-week schedule:
1. Introduction to the course. Presentation of the course, requirements, and literature
2. Theoretical foundations of pragmalinguistics. Historical development of pragmalinguistics
3. Functions of language and context
4. Speech act theory
5. Deixis and reference
6. Presuppositions and implicatures
7. The cooperative principle and the pragmatics of politeness
8. Cohesion, coherence, and textuality
9. Contemporary pragmatic approaches
10. Discourse analysis I
11. Discourse analysis II
12. Methodology of pragmalinguistic research: corpus pragmatics, computational methods, and contemporary research approaches in pragmalinguistics
13. Mini-workshop: applying pragmalinguistic concepts to authentic texts and preparing student presentations
14. Student presentations
15. Student presentations and final discussion

Required reading
Huang, Yan. 2007. Pragmatics. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Cutting, J. 2008. Pragmatics and Discourse: A Resource Book for Students. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Suggested reading
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge.
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.