Die Semantik-Pragmatik Schnittstelle - Einzelansicht

Leibnitz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Schützenstr. 18, R. 403
10117 Berlin

The class can be taught in English or German depending on student needs. [Der Kurs kann abhängig von den Bedürfnissen der Studierenden in deutscher oder englischer Sprache unterrichtet werden.]

In the 1970s, a sequential view of how semantics and pragmatics interact emerged (Grice, Searle):
semantics assigns a logical meaning to a sentence which usage conditions on communication make
reference to. Despite its strong intuitive appeal, this view frayed as soon as linguists attempted to
formally specify the pragmatic conditions. A conception where ”semantic” and ”pragmatic”
operations are interleaved with each other fares empirically better, but leaves the ”pragmatic”
conditions without grounding in communication. I primarily present this conundrum, but then
espouse a alternate view of pragmatics based on cognitive efficiency following Meyer (2013).