Mon. 10/29 Class Cancelled

Posted by on

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, today’s Pragmatics class has been cancelled.  Professor Fraser has graciously offered to visit our class at a later point during the semester–I am currently working with him to find a date that will work for both of our schedules.

What this means is that your fourth reading response assignment (on Prof. Fraser’s papers concerning pragmatic markers) is not due tomorrow.  In fact, there will be no written work due tomorrow.

If Professor Fraser is able to give a guest lecture for us later this semester, then I will ask you to submit this particular reading response at that point.  In other words, if you have already written your reading response for this week, then don’t delete it, since you may very well be asked to turn it in soon.

Later today, I will post  your readings and written assignment for our next class meeting (Monday, November 5).  And as soon as I can, I will also post an adjusted schedule.

Stay safe and dry folks!

Reading for M 10/29: Fraser 1996, 2008, 2009

Posted by on

As I announced in class, we will have a guest lecture from Prof. Bruce Fraser (SED) next Monday, 10/29.  Prof. Fraser will share with us his past and current research on discourse markers.  He has kindly passed along the following three articles, which should be read in advance of our next class meeting (they are all posted in the “Readings” section of our course website):

Fraser, Bruce. 1996. Pragmatic Markers.  MS, Boston University.

Fraser, Bruce. 2008. Topic Orientation Markers. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 892-898.

Fraser, Bruce. 2009. An Account of Discourse Markers. International Review of Pragmatics 1: 293-320.

A reading response assignment regarding these papers will be posted shortly.

Reading for M 10/22: Huang 2007, Ch. 3 (pgs. 64-75); Karttunen 1973 (skip §8,10,11)

Posted by on

For M 10/22, please read the following two items, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

1.  Huang, Yan. 2007. Pragmatics, Chap. 3 (‘Presupposition’), pgs. 64-75.

2.  Karttunen, Lauri. 1973. Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4: 169-193.

(Note:  You should skip sections 8,10,11 of the Karttunen paper.)

Reading for M 10/15: Sadock 1978; Carston 1988 (skip §5)

Posted by on

For M 10/15, please read the following two articles, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

1.  Sadock, Jerrold M. 1978. On testing for conversational implicature. In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 9: Pragmatics, 281-297. New York: Academic Press.

2.  Carston, Robyn. 1988. Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. In Ruth M. Kempson (ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface Between Language and Reality, 155-181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(Note:  You should skip section 5 of the Carston paper.)

Reading for Tu 10/9: Geurts 2010, Chap. 3; Papafragou & Musolino 2003

Posted by on

For Tu 10/9, please complete the following two readings, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

1.  Geurts, Bart. 2010. Quantity Implicatures, Chap. 3 (‘Scalar Implicatures’)

2.  Papafragou, Anna & Julien Musolino. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86: 253-282.

Reading for M 10/1: Grice 1975; Geurts 2010, Chap. 2

Posted by on

For M 10/1, please complete the following two readings, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

1.  Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41-58. New York: Academic Press. (Reprinted in Grice 1989, Studies in the Way of Words, 22-40.)

2.  Geurts, Bart. 2010. Quantity Implicatures, Chap. 2 (‘The Standard Recipe for Q-Implicatures’).

Note #1 regarding the Geurts reading:  The sections entitled ‘Competence and competence+’ and ‘What are weak implicatures?’ on pgs. 37-40 may be safely omitted.

Note #2 the Geurts reading, I’ve also provided the “Notations and abbreviations” section for the entire book.  Be sure to have a look at it, both for a review of our propositional logic connectives, and also for the particular typographic conventions that Geurts employs.