UCL - Semio-pragmatics

[COMU1221]

[30h + 10h] 4 credits

Teacher(s): Philippe Verhaegen

Language: French

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

By the end of this course, students should have acquired:
- critical mastery of the principal concepts in semio-pragmatic theory and the various components (linguistic, iconic etc) of communication mechanisms
- an ability to use these concepts to analyse concrete communication mechanisms with a view to evaluating or formulating hypotheses on how they function within the field of social interaction and from a cognitive viewpoint

Main themes

This course operates within a socio-discursive interactional framework, which takes account of the range of semiotic systems and mechanisms in social interactions and socialisation and organisational processes. The course analyses successively the various dimensions of media communication established by a number of linguistic and semiotic theories;
- the "significance" dimension as proposed by structuralist theory and the code model ;
- the relational dimension, as put forward by pragmatic theory (linguistics of enunciation, speech act theory , systemic theory of analogue communication, etc.) ;
- the cognitive dimension, introduced by theories from the Cognitive Sciences which pay attention to the operations involved in communicative processes and their correlating mental representations (planning theories, Inferential Pragmatics )
The critical analysis of features pertaining to these dimensions is intended to draw out and specify the indicators which make it possible to characterise any act of communication as the implementation of a relational and cognitive mechanism.

Content and teaching methods

The course analyses these dimensions successively, drawing on a range of linguistic and semiotic theories to take the analysis further. The principal topics covered are:
-Psychosociological Pragmatics,
-the linguistic theory of enunciation
- the linguistic theory of illocutionary acts
- the relationship between communication and cognition and Inferential Pragmatics
- Semio-pragmatics and Cognitive Semiotics,
- the concept of socio-discursive interactionism.
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Teaching will comprise lectures, case studies analysed in class and analyses carried out in small groups.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Course entry requirements: Students should have taken the General Semiotics course
Evaluation: The evaluation covers students' theoretical control of the concepts and their capacity to apply them to the analysis of a concrete message. In addition, there will be at least one test during the term, to monitor what has been acquired.