John DU BOIS

Le labex TransferS a invité John W. Du Bois, de l’Université de Californie, Santa Barbara, pour deux séminaires en langue anglaise en 2012

New Directions in Pragmatics and Semantics

Courses are based on recent research by Mira Ariel and John W. Du Bois. Each course is designed to be self-contained, and can be taken independently of each other, or combined for additional scope of theoretical and empirical coverage.

Contacts : Thierry Poibeau, Michel Charolles
La participation aux séminaires pourra être certifiée par les enseignants pour la validation d’ECTS.

This course presents a specific view of the state of the art in pragmatics, semantics, and especially the division of labor between them. The foundations of the course are based on two recent books by Ariel, Pragmatics and Grammar (2008) and Defining Pragmatics (2010). We focus on synchronic aspects of meaning interpretation, drawing extensively on linguistic examples taken from naturally occurring discourse. We begin by setting the stage with an assessment of the current status of classical questions about implicatures, explicatures, `what is said´, and the nature of pragmatic inference (lectures 1, 2). We then take up the recently developed theory of dialogic syntax, considered as an aspect of the structure of engagement in interaction ; it is contrasted with traditional linear, sentential syntax (lecture 3 ; cf. DuBois, forthcoming). This leads to a pragmatic view of the linguistic act of taking a stance, encompassing evaluation, positioning, and alignment (lecture 4 ; DuBois 2007). Finally we examine the rising practice of scholarly argumentation from discourse to semantic claims, proposing to clarify the distinction between appropriate vs. fallacious uses of the method (lecture 5).

References
Ariel, Mira (2008). Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Ariel, Mira (2010). Defining pragmatics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Du Bois, John W. (2007). The stance triangle". Stancetaking in discourse : Subjectivity