Universität Wien

122229 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper / MA historical & descriptive linguistics / MA applied linguistics (2012S)

Language in context

11.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 12 - Anglistik
Continuous assessment of course work


Seminar schedule:

March 13
Introduction and distribution of topics

March 20
Language in context – the emerging issues – Kryk-Kastovsky

April 17
Malinowski’s and Firth’s notions of context of situation –Jairth
The phenomena of social context vs. co-text –Neundlinger

April 24
Common ground, mutual knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge – Meisinger
Deixis – a representation of spatio-temporal relations in language – Hollerer

May 8
Methods of data collection in pragmatics and sociolinguistics ("observer's paradox","the observational linguist", etc.).
Are the Anglo-Saxons more polite than the speakers of other languages?

May 15
Proximity and distance in European and non-European languages and cultures
How does the language of women differ from the language of men?

May 22
Forms of address as an example of social deixis in various speech communities
Humour across languages and cultures

June 5
Language and society: politeness/indirectness in English and German discourse
The role of silence in various linguistic-cultural communities

June 12
Compliments in English, German and other languages
Social variation in language – examples from English and German

June 19
Is racism a social, political and linguistic danger?
The role of the media in news reporting

June 26
Socio-pragmatic failure in cross-linguistic interaction
How politically correct are we in English, German and other languages?

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 18 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Tuesday 13.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 20.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 27.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 17.04. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 24.04. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 08.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 15.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 22.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 05.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 12.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 19.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07
  • Tuesday 26.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Besprechungsraum Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O2-07

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

The aim of the 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.

Assessment and permitted materials

Class participation, oral paper presentation, a final written essay.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

The aim of the course is to demonstrate how the methodological issues mentioned above can be instantiated by various genres of spoken and written discourse.

Examination topics

Oral presentations of assigned topics (followed by a discussion in class) and a written version of the paper.

Reading list

Selected bibliography:

Attardo, S. 1994. Linguistic theories of humour. Berlin.
Austin, J.L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford.
de Beaugrande, R. & W. Dressler. 1981. Introduction to text linguistics. London.
Blum-Kulka, S. 1987. "Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different?", Journal of Pragmatics 11, 131-146.
Braun, F. 1988. Terms of address: problems of patterns and usage in various languages and cultures. Berlin.
Brown, P. & S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge.
Cameron, D. 1990. The feminism critique of language. New York.
Cameron, D. 1995. Verbal hygiene. London.
Chiaro, D. 1992. The language of jokes: analysing verbal play. London.
Coates, J. & D. Cameron. 1989. Women in their speech communities. London.
Coleman, L. & P. Kay. 1981. "Prototype semantics: the English word lie", Lg 57(1), 26- 44.
Comrie, B. 1985. Tense. Cambridge.
Cook, G. 1992. The discourse of advertising. London.
Coulmas, F. (ed.), 1981. Conversational routine: explorations in standardized communication situations and pre-patterned speech. The Hague.
Denny, J.P. 1978. "Locating universals in lexical systems for spatial deixis", CLS, Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, 71-84.
van Dijk, T. Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park.
Fasold, R. 1984. The sociolinguistics of society. Oxford.
----------- 1990. The sociolinguistics of language. Oxford.
Fillmore, Ch. 1975. "Santa Cruz lectures on deixis 1971", Indiana University Linguistics Club. Bloomington, Indiana.
Firth, J.R. 1957. “Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski’s views”,
in Firth, J.R. (ed.). Man and culture. London. 93-118.
Fraser, B. 1981. "On apologizing", in: Coulmas, F. (ed.), 259-272.
Freemason, Ch. 1981. "The structure and use of politeness formulas", in: Coulmas, F. (ed.), 21-35.
Garner, J.F. 1995. Politically correct bedtime stories. New York.
Garner, J.F. 1998. Politically correct holiday stories. New York.
Geis, M. 1987. The language of politics. New York.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of talk. Oxford.
Grice, H.P. 1975. "Logic and conversation", in: Cole, P. & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3. Speech acts. New York, 41-58.
Grice, H.P. 1981. "Presupposition and conversational implicature", in: Cole, P. (ed.), Radical pragmatics. New York, 183-198.
Grundy, P. 1995. Doing pragmatics. London.
Hodge, R. & G. Kress. 1993. Language and ideology. London.
Holmes, J. 1988. "Paying compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy", Journal of Pragmatics 12, 445-466.
House, J. & G. Kasper. 1981. "Politeness markers in English and German", in: Coulmas, F. (ed.), 157-185.
Hudson, R.A. 1980/1996. Sociolinguistics. Cambridge.
Jaworski, A. 1993. Power of silence. London.
Jaworski, A. (ed.). Silence: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Berlin.
Jucker, A. 1986. News interviews. Amsterdam.
Jucker, A. 1992. Social stylistics: syntactic variation in English newspapers. Berlin.
Kasper, G. 1999. "Data collection in pragmatic research". University of Hawaii Working Papers in ESL 18(1). 71-107.
Katriel, T. 1986. Talking straight: dugri speech in Israeli Sabra culture. Cambridge.
Kempson, R. 1975. Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics. Cambridge.
Kempson, R. 1977. Semantic theory. Cambridge.
Kryk, B. 1987. On deixis in English and Polish: the role of demonstrative pronouns. Frankfurt.
Kurzon, D. 1997. Discourse of silence. Amsterdam.
Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London.
Leech, G. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London.
Levin, S. 1977. The semantics of metaphor. Baltimore.
Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge.
Levinson, S. 1987. "Minimization and conversational inference", in: Verschueren, J. & M. Bertucelli-Papi (eds.), 61-129.
Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge.
Malinowski, B. 1923. "The problem of meaning in primitive languages", in: Ogden, C. & Richards, J. (eds.), 296-336. London.
Mey, J. 1993. Pragmatics: an introduction. Oxford.
Norrick, N. 1993. Conversational joking. Humour in everyday talk. Bloomington.
Ogden, C. & Richards, J. (eds.). 1923. The meaning of meaning. London.
Oleksy, W. 1989. Contrastive pragmatics. Amsterdam.
Raskin, V. 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humour. Dordrecht.
Rauh, G. 1983. Essays on deixis. Tübingen.
Sacks, H., et al. 1974. "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation", Lg 50(4), 696-735.
Schiffrin, D. 1994. Approaches to discourse. Oxford.
Searle, J. 1969. Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge.
Shibatani, M. & S. Thompson (eds.). 1995. Essays in semantics and pragmatics in honor of Charles J. Fillmore. Amsterdam.
Stenström, A-B. 1994. An introduction to spoken interaction. London.
Sweetser, E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge.
Tannen, D. 1986. That's not what I meant! How conversational style makes or breaks relationships. New York.
Tannen, D. 1989. Talking voices. Cambridge.
Thomas, J. 1983. "Cross-cultural pragmatic failure", Applied Linguistics 4: 91-112.
Thomas, J. 1995. Meaning in interaction. London.
Trudgill, P. 1974. Sociolinguistics. London.
Verschueren, J. 1985. What people say they do with words. Norwood, N.J.
Verschueren, J. & M. Bertucelli-Papi, M. (eds.). 1987. The pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam.
Watts, R., et al. (eds.). 1992. Politeness in language. Berlin.
Wierzbicka, A. 1991. Cross-cultural pragmatics. Berlin.
Wierzbicka, A. 1992. Semantics, culture, and cognition. Oxford.
Wierzbicka, A. 1998. "German 'cultural scripts': public signs as a key to social attitudes and cultural values", Discourse and Society 9/2: 241-282.
Young, J.W. 1991. Orwell's newspeak and totalitarian language. Charlottesville.
Zupnik, Y.-J. 1994. "A pragmatic analysis of the use of person deixis in political discourse", Journal of Pragmatics 21: 339-383.

Association in the course directory

Studium: Diplom 343, UF 344, BA 612, ME 812;
Code/Modul: Diplom 222, 226/228, 236/238, 721-723, 821, UF 4.2.3-222, BA06.2, M04, M05
Lehrinhalt: 12-0312

Last modified: Th 09.01.2025 00:16