The course investigates topics in semantics and pragmatics including how meaning is expressed in natural language and the principles that lie behind the interpretation of utterances in specific situations. It addresses topics such as how words and sentences (linguistic objects) relate to entities in the world; whether this relationship is mediated by concepts; the formal representation of meaning; how the study of meaning is relevant to other areas of linguistic analysis such as syntax; how and why language differs from other communication systems; and how language is employed to communicate various types of meaning.

The objectives of this course are to:

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• Get insight into basic issues of linguistic semantics, e.g. how linguistic expressions relate to entities in the world, meaning relations between linguistic expressions, and the relation between meaning and truth.
• Understand the basic issues in pragmatics, including how context and pragmatic principles affect interpretation.
• Get an awareness of how semantic and pragmatics interact and relate to neighbouring fields (e.g., lexical theory, morphology and syntax).
• Comprehend how language differs from other communication systems, and how language is employed to communicate various types of meaning.

Unit –I

• Theories of meaning
• Types of meaning
• Semantic field
• Componential analysis
• Sense Relations/ Lexical Relations (Hyponymy; Synonymy; Antonymy;
• Homonymy and Polysemy)

UNIT –II

•        ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Syntactic     Semantics     (Contradiction,    Ambiguity,     Semantic     anomaly Entailment, Presupposition)

UNIT –III

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• Speech act theory complex speech acts
• Felicity conditions
• Conversational implicature
• The cooperative principle

UNIT –IV

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• Conversational maxims
• Relevance

UNIT –V

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• Politeness
• Phatic tokens
• Deixis

Teaching will be done through lecture method with a combination of tasks/projects and presentations.

Assessment and Examinations

Assessment will be done as per university/department policy.