Speech Acts are the smallest units with a communicative function of their own. A name like Susan refers to a person and does not have a communicative function other than as a building block for a larger utterance, but used with appropriate prosody as in Susan!, it can serve as an independent social act by which the speaker attracts a person’s attention. Similarly, a clause like Susan sang denotes a communicatively inert proposition, but used in an assertion, a speaker can make a public commitment to its truth. Hence, speech acts sit right at the contested border of semantics and pragmatics.
The course will start out with the classical approaches to speech acts and then focus on recent semantic and pragmatic theories. It will present a theoretical view in which communicative acts are modeled within an extended framework of dynamic semantics, as mappings from information states to information states. We will pay particular attention to the social commitments that speakers undergo and impose on the addressees by speech acts. Also, there will be a focus on how morphosyntactic and prosodic means are used to express and to modify speech acts. We will also look at how speech acts work in conversation, e.g. how we refer to speech acts and how they form adjacency pairs.
Prerequesite: A good understanding of truth-conditional semantics; an understanding of dynamic semantics is helpful. Students are expected to work out regular homework and discuss them in class, and to write a paper on a course-related topic. The course will be taught in English: discussion and papers can also be in German.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka