Through lectures and language practice investigation, this course gives students an understanding of basic theories and methods raised by renowned western scholars in the field of pragmatics and some new theories, principles or criteria raised by Chinese pragmatists. Students will master certain rules in Chinese pragmatics and use them to observe, analyze certain pragmatics phenomenon in Chinese; this course also trains students to use basic theories, principles and methods to observe, analyze, study and explain certain pragmatics phenomenon, characteristics and patterns in Chinese; lays foundation for future study and discovering pragmatics rules in Chinese.

This course gives a relatively more comprehensive introduction to the following content: basic theories and methods of pragmatics, main schools of thoughts and theories raised by prominent scholars, and based on which concrete examples will be analyzed; basic theories of context including the definition, classification, characteristics and function of context, and the meaning and value of studying context; phenomenon of indicatives, words and expressions, including the meaning and information of indicatives and all kinds of usages plus all kinds of indicative phenomenon in Chinese and related studies; theory of language behavior and meaning of conversation including principles of conversation and manners, etc.; pre-assumption, information, focus and related theories, analytic techniques, conducting case studies combined with Chinese; conversation structures, etc.

Instruction style: a combination of lecturing, discussion, investigation of language applications, and reading relevant literature.