The title of this lecture has been deliberately kept vague in order to accommodate a wide array of topics that fall into the realm of pragmatics. After a brief consideration of the core notion of context, the lecture will provide a sound introduction to some of the fundamental theoretical frameworks of pragmatics, such as Grice’s theory of cooperative conversation, Austin’s and Searle’s versions of speech act theory and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, before turning to somewhat more specific issues, such as how we understand what not said (e.g. indirect or ironic utterances) and the use and functions of (im)politeness. To round off, we will discuss how multimodal communication can be analyzed from a linguistic-pragmatic point of view. 

Kurs im HIS-LSF