LING 041. Pragmatics

In our daily usage of languages, what a sentence conveys can be much richer than its literal meaning. For example, from the sentence Ede had too much coﬀee and couldn’t fall asleep last night, we can draw not only a conjunction of two propositions (the literal meaning), but also a causality relation between these two propositions (the non-literal meaning) -having too much coﬀee made Ede unable to fall asleep last night. The non-literal aspect of meaning can either make communication more eﬃcient, or cause bumps or potholes.

This course is about Pragmatics, the subfield of Linguistics devoted to understanding the non-literal aspect of meaning, such as how the utterance context and conversational maxims aﬀect the meaning of an utterance, and what an utterance attributes to the context. In this course, we will focus on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics and will explore a range of theoretical and experimental studies in pragmatics.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for COGS.
Spring 2026. Sag.
Catalog chapter: Linguistics
Department website: http://swarthmore.edu/linguistics

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