Pragmatics

Any time we utter a sentence in conversation, the perceived meaning of that sentence interacts with the discourse context in a rich variety of ways. On the one hand, aspects of a sentence's meaning are ``filled in'' or enriched by the prior conversation as well as non-linguistic context. On the other hand, utterances shape the future of the conversation in various ways too. This course is an introduction to the scientific study of such phenomena. Specific topics include: presupposition, implicature, speech acts, deixis, anaphora, (in)definiteness, and information structure.