Pragmatico- linguistic analysis of Italian literary texts

Teacher(s)

Maeder Costantino;

Language

Italian

Prerequisites

- to be familiar with the main event in the history of Italian literature.
- to be able to express oneself orally in Italian.
- to be able to write a text in Italian.
- to be familiar with the main ideas of narratology and of textual analysis.

Main themes

The pragmatic approaches of language, as put forward by Austin, Searle or Grice, offer strategies of interpretation of texts and complex works (mixed media like the opera or the theatre), which are both fundamental and revealing.
The course will present the most important notions, as well as some more recent research (Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Lo Cascio, Cosenza), and will apply them in a critical fashion to different literary and dramatic texts.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	Be able to recognize the phenomena presented in class within texts; Be able to formulate textual interpretations that take into account the analysed elements; To have read a series of literary and dramatic texts; To be able to analyse critically a text as seen in class; To be able to give a critical analysis of a text using the means detailed in the lectures.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Content

We will study dialectically the possible transfers between literary analysis and linguistic analysis.
After studying a series of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive concepts, we will show how linguistic and pragmatic approaches make it possible to analyse a literary text in an original way or how the analysis of literary texts can be used to revise linguistic concepts or phenomena.
Students will be invited to present a work on specific works or a specific linguistic phenomenon.
They will:

'    choose a certain number of concepts from those discussed in the lecture or in the literature,
'    identify a problem (e.g. address practises),
'    apply them to the chosen work,
'    assess their relevance and effectiveness in the analysis.





 

Teaching methods

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Evaluation methods

June session
'    Written work: analysis of a text (50%)
'    Exam (50%)

September session
'    Written work: analysis of a text (50%)
'    Exam (50%)




 

Other information

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Bibliography

Choix :

'    Stephen C. Levinson, La pragmatica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993.
'    Claudia Bianchi, Pragmatica del linguaggio, Bari, Laterza, 2003.
'    H. Paul Grice, 'Logic and Conversation', in: Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3. Speech Acts', édité par P. Cole e J. Morgan, New York, Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41-58.
'    Romane Werner, Costantino Maeder, A corpus-based and corpus-driven analysis of T-V-address practices in Italian: when men are politer than women, working paper.
'    Carla Bazzanella, Linguistica e pragmatica del linguaggio. Un'introduzione, Roma-Bari, 2005.
'    Dan Sperber et Deirdre Wilson, La pertinence. Communication et cognition, Paris, Minuit, 1989.



 

Faculty or entity

ROM