122234 AR Linguistics Course (interactive) (2011W)

Following Hymes's paper 'On Communicative Competence' (1970), the influence of pragmatics on language teaching methodology has been mostly in the speech act area. Similarly, research in interlanguage pragmatics has also been mostly speech act directed and, as Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) point out, has focused more strongly on L2 communication than L2 learning. Indeed, overall, there is surprisingly little literature on the implications of most pragmatic phenomena for L2 pedagogy. Accordingly, in this course, we will consider a range of phenomena which are often overlooked despite their significant implications for L2 pedagogy and classroom practice. These include indexicality (how language encodes context), the relationship between words and mental representation, presumptive meaning (the degree to which the implied meaning of an utterance is predictable from its form), implicature (the inferences that a hearer must make in order to understand a speaker), the metapragmatic dimension of language (how speakers direct hearers in the interpretation of utterances by means of intonation, discourse markers, etc.), propositional attitude (the stance speakers take in relation to what they say), pragmatic accommodation (how speakers in intercultural encounters converge), and language evolution seen from a pragmatic perspective. We will consider the implications of each area studied for language teaching practice. Sometimes this will be at a practical level (for example, "What are the implications of lexical pragmatics for vocabulary teaching?"), sometimes at the level of methodology or rationale (for example, "Should the path of acquisition follow the path of evolution?").