In this course, we are going to learn more on language use as rational communication, i.e. a goal-oriented interactional activity. This course will help you to critically work through academic literature in preparation to your master thesis. To achieve this, we will also dedicate time to elaborate, how you can prepare to write a state-of-the-art for your MA-thesis.
We are going to reflect on two main aspects (1) language use and (2) information theory, investigating the role of predictability in language use and how this affects production and comprehension.
We will achieve this goal by reading a distributed list of papers throughout the course. For this we proceed as follows:
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in our first session, each of you will be assigned two/three papers she/he is responsible for
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each session two people will be presenting two different papers (either by content and questions, or fostering discussion by the commonalities/differences in the papers)
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all others read the two papers as well (and also note down questions, arising while reading - there are no silly questions!)
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in class, after a short introduction of the paper (by the responsible person), we try to answer questions proposed by the second responsible person and others and/or discuss commonalities and differences of the papers presented
So far, this has always been a very interactive seminar, we had lots of interesting but also funny discussions on how we use language.
Looking forward to seeing many of you this winter term!
