Linguistic meaning in theory and practice: Selected issues in lexicology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics

The aim of the seminar is to investigate the nature of human verbal communication. The seminar seeks to examine the elusive notion of meaning at different levels – words, phrases, sentences and discourse – so as to present and analyse a wide variety of semantic and pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, polysemy, idiomaticity, ambiguity (to mention just a few). The participants may also choose to discuss certain aspects of politically-correct language, gender-based language use, political discourse, euphemistic language, the language of advertising, the language of the Internet, punning, (im)politeness phenomena (e.g. complimenting, offending), etc. The seminar will make available various methods and theoretical approaches, thus making it possible to study selected phenomena from different perspectives, including cross-linguistic comparisons. The students are expected to make short presentations on the issues relevant to the topics of their MA theses and share their ideas with others. Seminars will involve both group discussions and face-to-face consultations. The assessment is based on the student’s class participation, presentations and progress in working on his/her MA thesis.