The homepage for the course is http://ling.ucsd.edu/courses/lign176/.
| Instructor | TA | |
|---|---|---|
| Farrell Ackerman | Klinton Bicknell | |
| Office: | AP&M 4101 | AP&M 3351B |
| Office hours: | Mondays 11:30-12:30 | Wednesdays 1-2 |
| Phone: | (858) 534-1158 | |
| email: | ackerman [at] ling.ucsd.edu | kbicknell [at] ucsd.edu |
| Lecture times: | MWF 10:00-10:50am |
|---|---|
| Lecture location: | Center 113 |
The schedule (including assignments and links to the readings) is available here. (This site is password protected. Please use the password we gave out in class.)
There will be downloadable readings from the class website and multiple copies of the readings in the Language Laboratory on the 3rd floor of AP&M. There will also be several (dvd) documentaries. Arrangements will be made to show them in class or in the language lab in AP&M. Find readings online here.
There will be approximately 5 homework assignments ( = 60%) and a take-home final ( = 40%). The TA will grade the homework assignments. The final will be graded by the TA and the instructor.
What are the beliefs that guide our e.g., purchases, votes, and how do we come to believe such things? Commercial/political/religious advertising and public relations are obvious areas where carefully crafted language and an understanding of how language is used constitute the basic tools for constructing persuasive messages. The course focuses on the methods and techniques used in propagating beliefs, rather than on evaluating the value or correctness of particular beliefs. The methodological bias of the course is on the explanatory role that linguistic analysis, broadly interpreted, can play in examining (per)suasive uses of language. For this reason we focus on providing an overview of basic ways that linguists approach the study of language as distinct from approaches adopted by other disciplines. This course, in other words, has a linguistic slant: a general goal of the course is to demonstrate that linguistics as a discipline has something important to add to studies of language use in advertising, politics, and law, and that insightful research by journalists, cultural historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, diarists, among others, can be improved upon with an increase in linguistic sophistication.
In general, we will explore the differences, between what is actually (literally) said or asserted in texts versus what is effectively conveyed or implied in these texts. In order to show that there is a principled relation between what is said versus what is conveyed we will emphasize the prominent role of the linguistic subdiscipline pragmatics. This discipline focuses on how speakers use language, and how context, construed broadly to include historically determined socio-cultural background and narrowly to include specific speech situations, can determine received meanings in predictable ways. Though the course has a linguistic emphasis, it is necessarily inter-disciplinary with special attention given to perspectives from history, political science, social and cognitive psychology, anthropology, among other disciplines.