This online course (lesson) of Pragmatics deals with linguistic meaning, kinds of basic elements to make reference in characterising the meanings of words or other linguistic units, kinds of relevant data, and how to evaluate the various possible types of data and how word meanings change. Theoretical topics covered include categorisation construal acquisition of concepts metaphor blending metonymy compositionality mental spaces lexical semantic change. Various semantic domains will be examined in connection with these topics, e.g. colour terms, kinship, dimensional terms, verb meaning but two domains will be treated in depth from various perspectives: the semantics of everyday concepts, and the semantics of space and motion. For pragmatics theoretical frameworks are speech acts, implicature, presupposition, relevant theory, cooperative principles, politeness principles, references, deixies, contexts and co-texts. The final project is documenting the short functional texts are found in the public areas to interpret the communication functions.
