122221 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2020S)

The goal of this course is to acquaint the students with a variety of language-in-context problems, be it general notions, like encyclopaedic knowledge vs. shared knowledge, or more specific issues, like deixis, the distinction between discourse and conversation, (im-)politeness, forms of address, etc.

The course covers issues which ensue from considering language in a wide geographical and socio-cultural context. After a discussion of some methodological points, e.g. the Observer`s Paradox, data collection techniques, quantitative vs. qualitative studies, some more detailed problems will be tackled:
a) the notions of context, common ground, etc. in the interpretation of utterances;
b) the codification of spatio-temporal relations in various language systems;
c) organisation of conversation (discourse analysis vs. conversation analysis);
d) analytical tools in communicative exchange: the Co-operative Principle, the Politeness Principle, the notion of face, etc.;
e) forms of address (social deixis) in various speech communities;
f) languages in contact (multilingual speech communities, code switching).

Students will be assigned the topic of a scholarly paper to prepare in consultation with the instructor in the first session of the course. Subsequent course sessions will consist of the presentation of one or more of these student-prepared papers, followed by a general discussion.