• Oswald Steve

• Oswald Steve

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.

Evaluation

Attendance and participation are compulsory. A written essay (3’500 words) perhaps combined with an oral presentation, depending on attendance (to be decided in week 2 or week 3), will earn students the 6 ECTS.

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

Bibliographical references to be read in the proseminar will be posted on Moodle during the semester.