SPAN3705

This pragmatics course deals with the social aspects of sense-making. Here you will learn how members of Spanish culture create meaning in oral and written exchanges. Meaning is not simply transmitted from speaker to audience but negotiated by the participants of the communicative interaction. You will learn how Spanish speakers deal with requests, refusals, compliments, advice, and apologies, and how they accommodate their discourse to their interlocutors. You will also explore how courtesy and discourtesy are expressed and inferred by Spanish speakers and how Spanish is utilized to persuade the audience, thus bringing up issues of language and power. Finally, you will study how members of Hispanic culture express themselves by non-verbal means (gestures, body movements, etc.). In sum, you will be exposed to the sociocultural resources native speakers utilize to infer and convey meaning. In class, after learning the theory, you will work in groups analyzing real cases of oral and written communicative exchanges in Spanish. You will also be asked to work in groups to envision how a native Spanish speaker would linguistically act in a hypothetical communicative situation.

prereq: grade of C- or better in SPAN 3104W or SPAN 3104V or TLDO 3104W or ARGN 3104W or SPAN 3105W or SPAN 3105V or TLDO 3105W or SPAN 3107W or SPAN 3107V or TLDO 3107W

002677

00180