• Oswald Steve

• Oswald Steve

What are the linguistic means speakers have at their disposal when they want to refer to what other people have said? This seminar looks at the different ways in which speakers represent other people’s thoughts or words – and in particular at those cases where speakers misrepresent other people’s thoughts or words.

During the semester, we will survey semantic, pragmatic but also argumentative phenomena that speakers resort to when they want to refer to other people’s speech: direct and reported speech, belief reports, strawmen fallacies, metalinguistic negation, echo questions, etc. The notion of commitment, which relates to what speakers can be said to having taken for granted in making their utterances, will also prominently permeate all our discussions. In this sense, this seminar is fundamentally about understanding and exploring how communicators manage speaker meaning.

A more practical aspect of the seminar will be devoted to the analysis of misrepresentation in political and news discourse: in their essay, students will be expected to analyse real occurrences of misrepresentation by comparing, along the relevant pragmatic dimensions, the original speeches and their misrepresentation.

Evaluation

Written evaluation (4’000-4’500 word essay).

At the end of the seminar, students should:

• know and be able to describe a typology of strategies of (mis)representation
• be familiar with different pragmatic notions and accounts meant to explain how (mis)representation works
• analyse texts and speeches involving (mis)representation according to these theoretical constructs

Bibliographical references will be given on Moodle week after week.