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Spoken language has been characterized as "messy" by many researchers from Saussure to Chomsky, who disregarded it as a subject for linguistic study. It is essential to everyday human comunication, and since the 1980s, modern pragmatics has focused on the many features that distinguish it from spoken language, such as hesitation, hedges, pauses, pitch and speed variation, intonation, turn-taking, repair and repetition, and its pragmatic and discursive setting. In this seminar we will look at these features and discuss concrete examples in spoken corpus data. During the semester, students will also perform hands-on research by recording and transcribing conversations in the context of our Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE) corpus and documenting as well as researching these features in their own data. The transcript will also count towards course credit.A list of topics for presentations and research will be available in the first seminar session. The accompanying voluntary tutorial offers students individual advice on the topics discussed in the seminar. Near the end of the semester, a paper conference will be held to make sure students are headed in the right direction with their term papers. For detailed course requirements please also consult the respective module descriptions. |
