LFU:online

Students will acquire a sound knowledge of the methodologies of variational pragmatics and will gain a comprehensive overview of studies that have been conducted to date. They will, moreover, be able apply the methods of variational pragmatics to their own small-scale research projects.

Variational pragmatics is a relatively recent sub-discipline of pragmatics which combines the methods of sociolinguistics and of pragmatics. Variational pragmatics studies aim to explore the influence of macro-social factors such as region, gender, age and socio-economic status on the use of language in interaction. This can be done on different levels of analysis. These comprise, among others, the formal level, investigating the use of forms such as the pragmatic marker like, the actional level, studying speech acts such as requests, and on the interactional level, analysing sequences of utterances.

To date, most variational pragmatics studies have studied pragmatic differences between regional varieties of English, mainly considering the formal and the actional levels.

In this class, we will discuss variational pragmatic studies investigating different macro-social factors with respect to different levels of analysis and – in more hands-on sessions – consider how the methodologies could be applied to new data.

Reading tasks, group work, chaired group discussions of linguistic articles, corpus linguistic analyses

Schneider, Klaus and Anne Barron (eds). 2008. Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.

MA: none

Teacher Training Programme "old" (2001): Positive completion of first part of studies (1. Studienabschnitt).