Description
Subject summary:This unit introduces students to two important fields of linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, with special reference to English. It intersperses the theoretical elements with practical applications through examples, exercises and textual analysis, which enable students to understand the significance of these fields of linguistics to the languages professions, such as interpreting and translation and language teaching. The unit also aims to refine students' academic writing skills through the preparation of a short research paper.
Subject learning outcomes:
After successfully completing this unit, students will:
• be familiar with the problems of developing theories of meaning, and understand and be able to explain the relationship between semantics and pragmatics;
• be able to identify and explain word relations such as complementarity, antonymy, hyponymy and synonymy;
• understand and be able to explain methods of word-level semantic analysis such as componential analysis, semantic primes, semantic fields, and others;
• be familiar with the difficulties of explaining denotative and connotative meaning; understand the main principles of lexicography and be able to critically appraise English dictionaries;
• understand the main principles of lexicography and be able to critically appraise English dictionaries;
• understand and be able to explain key ideas in pragmatics such as Gricean maxims, conversational implicature and speech act theory; deixis and distance;
• have a basic understanding of conversation analysis;
• be familiar with important concepts and approaches in cross-cultural pragmatics;
• develop skills in analysing authentic texts for the purpose of identifying their linguistics features.