I just put up the beginnings of a website for the course I am teaching during the LSA summer institute, which takes place at MIT and Harvard this summer. I’ll be teaching a six week course on pragmatics in linguistic theory.
This is basically a condensed version of the regular pragmatics course that we teach here at MIT. There are going to be 12 90-minute course meetings. The course will be divided into 3 units with 4 course meetings each. We will cover three topics:
- Conversational Implicature
- Presupposition and Context Change
- Indexicality
In each unit, we will spend 3 meetings on developing basic concepts and formal tools. Then, in the 4th meeting of each unit, we will introduce and discuss some current “cutting edge” work in the area.
The institute is chock-full with interesting courses, conferences, and other events, too much to sample here. So, I’ll just mention some courses related to mine.
There is a six week introductory course on semantics taught by Gennaro Chierchia. And then there are a number of pragmatics-related three week courses:
- The Semantics and Pragmatics of Focus – David Beaver
- Clause Typing: From Syntax to Discourse Semantics – Paul Portner & Raffaella Zanuttini
- Scalar Implicatures and the Organization of Grammar – Danny Fox
- Alternatives in Semantics – Angelika Kratzer
- Pragmatics – Bob Stalnaker
And of course there is plenty of semantics, syntax, phonology, etc. Check out the website for the institute for more info.