The topic of this course is how meaning is expressed in language and how it is flexibly communicated and grounded in communication and interaction, including the underlying cognitive principles. This course will also focus on crosslinguistic and crosscultural differences in this domain as well as insights from behaviour and (neuro) cognition that might constrain/explain how semantics and pragmatics are expressed in languages and vice-versa.
We will also discuss how the general pragmatic mechanisms grounded in cognition and communication shape language structure and use at all levels (phonology, morphosyntax and lexicon).Some well-established theories will be presented, as well as several controversies. The students will be asked to argue about these issues in a debate format during the course and later write about them.
By the end of this course the students will learn about a multitude of diverse semantic and pragmatic phenomena in different human languages, and will be able to interpret them from a perspective of linguistics as well as (neuro) cognitive science(s).
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Course will be given in 4 related submodules .
Module 1: Semantics and pragmatics:Crosslinguistic variation and cognition
Asli Ozyurek
Synopsis: There are considerable differences in the way languages express and package meaning as well as how they are adjusted to contextual uses (e.g., demonstratives pronouns, discourse cohesion). What does linguistic variation across languages in semantics and pragmatics tell us about why languages are structured as they are and relations between language and (interactive) cognition?
Module 2: Communicative efficiency and language structure
Natalia Levshina
Synopsis This module will focus on communicative efficiency as a universal pragmatic principle, which manifests itself at different levels of language structure and use, namely, in phonology, morphosyntax and lexicon. We will consider cross-linguistic corpus-based and experimental evidence for several language universals, such as the law of abbreviation, dependency length minimization, and Greenbergian word order correlations, and discuss if and to what extent they can be explained by the cognitive and communicative processes of the speaker/signer and the addressee.
Module 3: The social basis of human language
Judith Holler
Synopsis: Human language is fundamentally grounded in social interaction, including its evolution, acquisition and day-to-day use. This module focuses on core social and pragmatic principles that underpin, shape and define human linguistic behavior and cognition when it occurs in social context.
Module 4 : The sensorimotor grounding of meaning in language
Laura Speed
Synopsis : How do we understand meaning in language? In this module we assess embodied theories of language that assign a critical role to the sensory and motor systems in meaning.
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