Discourse and Pragmatics
PhD Holly Kelly (now Alumna), giving a talk about meaning-carrying verbal and nonverbal utterances (gestures), their interaction with other speech, and how they are interpreted.
Pragmatics as the study of how the meaning of spoken and written discourse is related to the context in which that speech and writing occurs. Pragmatics is specifically concerned with how speakers' shared interests and purposes shapes discourse. The role of Pragmatics and Discourse is central to the research of various faculty in the department, from a variety of perspectives, including syntax, semantics, typology and sociolinguistics.
Core Faculty
Jürgen Bohnemeyer, PhD specializes in semantic typology, conceptual and formal semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, the semantics-pragmatics interface, linguistic anthropology and Mesoamerican languages.
Jean-Pierre Koenig, PhD studies how discourse structure helps inferring temporal structure or filling in underspecified semantic representations.
Mitsuaki Shimojo, PhD specializes in studies of discourse, and syntax-pragmatics interfaces in Role and Reference Grammar, aiming to bring together the studies of discourse and grammar and use discourse analysis to develop the theory of grammar. His research includes analysis of a range of morphosyntactic phenomena in Japanese discourse such as speakers’ choice of argument and sentence forms, including zero argument and predicate, and the use of non-basic word ordering. His work also involves analyses of L2 Japanese discourse in different situations including narratives and L2-only conversations, to describe L2 linguistic systems, which is a natural extension of the study of native speaker’s knowledge of their language, and to apply linguistic theory to a broader scope of phenomena including L2.