• Oswald Steve

*** IMPORTANT: If you cannot attend the first session (14.09.2020) in person, please register on Moodle (Indirectness in English [AS20], no password required). You will find the zoom link to join us live at the top of the page, under the first week of class displayed***

This proseminar will provide students with a broad panorama of the linguistic (especially pragmatic) dimensions of indirectness in English. Broadly speaking, indirectness may be said to characterise all utterances in which what speakers mean is significantly different from the meaning of the words they chose to express their thoughts. Of particular interest to us will be communicative phenomena in which indirectness is not ‘straightforward’ but problematic in some respects. Drawing on classical works but also on recent research in the field of pragmatic theory, we will i) try to understand what indirectness consists in and list its features, ii) attempt to explain how indirectness is linguistically expressed and understood in interaction, and iii) look at various communicative phenomena involving indirectness (insinuation, deception, (im)politeness, non-cooperation, evasion, denial, vagueness, aggression, joking, irony, etc.) in order to explore the multiplicity of functions indirectness may fulfil in communication.

At the end of the proseminar, students should:

• be familiar with the different pragmatic theories accounting for indirectness
• be able to describe, in terms of meaning construction, how indirect utterances are understood by performing pragmatic analyses of data in English
• be able to explain how indirectness is exploited to fulfil different communicative functions

The list of bibliographical references will be given on the first day of the proseminar and posted on Moodle.