Communication Pragmatics

Objectives

1. To communicate better and more effectively in different environments.

2. To be aware of the multiple levels of meaning in an utterance.

3. To know what can be accomplished through language.

4. To understand that a major part of communication is achieved through non-verbal means (non-verbal communication).

5. To understand how communication has adapted to new technologies (computer-mediated communication).

Program

1. Introduction – preliminary concepts.

2. Pragmatic principles (the communicative principle, the cooperative principle, the politeness principle, politeness strategies).

3. Semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning, the asserted meaning and the implied meaning (implicatures and presuppositions).

4. Speech acts.

5. Crisis communication.

6. Computer-mediated communication.

7. Non-verbal communication.

Teaching Methodologies

The course has an important theoretical component, which includes the presentation of the latest concepts and theories, along with a practical component, in which students are asked to do multiple exercises using the concepts and theories previously introduced.

Bibliography

GREEN, Georgia. M., 1989, Pragmatics and natural language understanding. 2.ª ed., 1996, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

GRUNDY, Peter, 1995, Doing pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold.

HORN, Laurence e Gregory Ward (Eds.), 2004, The handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

MEY, Jacob L., 1993, Pragmatics: an introduction. 2.ª ed., 2001, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

SMITH, Ronald D., 2002, Strategic planning for public relations. 3.ª ed., 2009, Nova Iorque: Routledge.