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Language is often ambiguous. In some cases this is caused by ambiguous sentence structures as in I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola (from the song “Lola” written by Ray Davies). In other cases it is not structural ambiguity but lexical ambiguity that allows for two or more readings of an utterance. In those cases a particular word has more than one meaning. The word bank, for example can mean refer to an institution that deals with finances or the river shore. However, in naturally produced language this is seldom problematic, since contextual information usually creates a bias towards a single preferred reading. In this course we will study in how this works exactly by looking at pragmatic theories, findings from psycholinguistic experiments (what processes happen in our brain while we try to make sense of a sentence?) and other current issues in the field of pragmatics. We will practice to analyse language with respect to pragmatic questions and discuss why it might be useful to study pragmatics. |
