Unit convenor and teaching staff |
Unit convenor and teaching staff
Lecturer
Jill Murray
Contact via email
C5A 526
email for an appointment
Margaret Wood
Peter Roger
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Credit points |
Credit points
4
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Prerequisites |
Prerequisites
Admission to MAppLing or MAppLingTESOL or MTransInter or MAdvTransInterStud or MTransInterMAppLingTESOL or MIntPubDip or MAccComm
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Corequisites |
Corequisites
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Co-badged status |
Co-badged status
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Unit description |
Unit description
This unit equips participants with the tools for analysis of how meaning is constructed in context through spoken and written language. The content includes speech act theory; politeness and face; the cooperative principle and implicature; relevance theory; cultural scripts; and metaphor. There is an emphasis on analysing how communication operates in different cultural contexts, and on accessing and interpreting current research. Communication in social and institutional contexts, language in the media, and practical implications for language learning and translating/interpreting are explored.
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Information about important academic dates including deadlines for withdrawing from units are available at https://www.mq.edu.au/study/calendar-of-dates
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
Late assignments The policy regarding late assignments has now been standardised across postgraduate Linguistics units.
Extensions cannot continue beyond the start of the following semester, and students should be aware that long extensions may impact graduation dates.
Academic Honesty
As a good student, you are responsible for ensuring academic integrity practices are followed at all times. Your first step is to read the University's Academic Honesty Policy, and make sure you know what constitutes good practice. Then make sure you know how to reference and cite correctly. There are other practices we need to consider, and one of these is the potential for collusion.
Informal study groups are encouraged as a good way to assist your learning, but please remember that all your independently assessed assignments must be totally independently completed. Unless you are doing a group project where each member contributes to producing one piece of work, for which you get the one mark, using part or all of someone else's work constitutes collusion and breaches the University's Academic Honesty policy.
Do not collude with any other student by selling, giving, lending, explaining or showing all or parts of your independently assessed work/answers/past or current assignments, and do not ask to buy, borrow, see and use all or parts of the work of another student.
Do not reuse any work you have presented for assessment in this or another unit. This will activate a turnitin alert.
Name | Weighting | Hurdle | Due |
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Assignment 1: Text analysis | 30% | No | Monday 1 April 2019 |
Assignment 2 Research project | 60% | No | Monday 10 June 2019 |
Participate in web activities | 10% | No | Throughout the unit |
Due: Monday 1 April 2019
Weighting: 30%
Analysis of transcript, plus commentary.
You will be given a transcribed spoken text to analyse, applying what you have learnt about the elements of context, implicature, speech act theory and politeness theory.
The assignment will be assessed in relation to the following criteria
The text will be made available to you two weeks before the due date.
Due: Monday 10 June 2019
Weighting: 60%
RESEARCH PROJECT Decide on an area of pragmatics that you would like to focus your research question.
Suggested theoretical areas are:
Im/politeness, implicature and/or relevance theory, discourse pragmatics, metaphor, critical discourse analysis.
This assignment will involve a small research project based on a defined pragmatics topic, involving the analysis of selected linguistic data. Please choose one of the following two options:
1. Perform a pragmatic investigation involving an encounter between two or more interactants which is in some way interesting or problematic. Cross-cultural interactions are a particularly rich source, but you may also like to investigate issues of power, gender or other areas explored in the unit. If you choose spoken data, it may be from a film; internet, radio, or television broadcast or other suitable public source. You will need to supply an appropriate transcript of relevant passages, showing the features which are relevant to your investigation. If you choose written data, it will usually consist of texts which are available in the public domain. This assignment will allow you to demonstrate your understanding of how pragmatics can be applied to explain the reasons and effects of the language choices made by the speakers or writers.
The type of pragmatic analysis you undertake will naturally depend on the nature of the discourse itself – not all aspects discussed in the unit may appear in or be relevant to your discourse sample and context. Do not attempt to cover all aspects dealt with in this unit!
OR
2. A pragmatic investigation on a topic of your choice involving the collection of data.
[a] Choose one speech act (or a set of related speech acts) which you think may be interesting to examine. Thoroughly review the published literature related to research investigation of the speech act(s). Design a task through which you will be able to gather data on performance of the task by people from different cultural backgrounds. This could be a discourse completion task ( DCT), a set of scenarios designed to elicit participants' reported responses to situations in specific contexts, or a task involving judgements of appropriateness. Your classmates will be invited to participate through the ilearn site. You can also advertise the research on social media.
[b] Alternatively, you may undertake a research project using a corpus such as the BNC, or COCA .
ANYONE PLANNING TO CHOOSE THIS OPTION MUST DISCUSS IT WITH THE UNIT CONVENOR AT LEAST 4 WEEKS BEFORE THE DUE DATE. THE ASSIGNMENT INVOLVING HUMAN PARTICIPANTS HAS GENERAL ETHICS APPROVAL,BUT AN AMENDMENT WILL NEED TO BE LODGED.
Keep your investigation focused and narrow in scope for this small study.
The general approach, format, style, mode of presentation, type of analysis, discussion and argument should aim to resemble the genre of the scholarly research paper found in professional refereed journals.
If in your exposition you refer to and discuss a piece of textual evidence (e.g., an exchange in an interaction), short excerpts can be shown in the main body of your text as well as being included in the longer transcript in an appendix. If you are quoting longer passages, it is recommended that you number each line in the transcript and refer to the line numbers.
The assignment will be assessed in relation to the following criteria. You should:
The word limit for this assignment (4000 words) does not include displayed data, any appendices and references.
Your grade will be mostly determined by:
Due: Throughout the unit
Weighting: 10%
Throughout the unit, there will be a number of web tasks that both internal and external students will be asked to complete. These are an important part of your learning.
Some of these will be optional, but others will be clearly indicated as contributing to your assessment.
Details will be provided on the ilearn site.
This unit is delivered in blended mode. This means that both internal and external students are expected to work through the online materials. For the internal students, it will be clearly indicated on the ilearn site which tasks and readings should be completed before the face to face session, which after. Most of the activities are compulsory but a small number are optional.
There is no textbook for this unit but the following resources texts are useful.
Archer, D., Aijmer, K., & Wichmann, A. (2012). Pragmatics: An advanced resource book for students. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN:978-0415497879
Archer. D. and Grundy, P. (Eds) (2011). The pragmatics reader. London and NY: Routledge
Bowes, H. & Martin, K. (2007). Communication across cultures: Mutual understanding in a global world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J., and Haugh, M. (2014). Pragmatics and the English language. UK/US: Palgrave McMillan
Hua, Z., (Ed) (2011) The language and intercultural communication reader. London and NY: Routledge
Reading material for this course consists of book chapters and some journal articles that can be found on e-reserve, and other journal articles can be accessed directly through the library catalogue. Weekly reading lists will be available on the i-learn site, which you can access from the first day of the course. Reading guides and questions are provided for the key readings.
For copyright reasons, some of the items on e-reserve may not be available for the entire period of the course. This means that students must download them when they are available and also that it is no cause for concern if readings do not appear until shortly before the corresponding module is due to commence.
The APPL911 website has a range of resources, including course notes, tasks, online discussions, etc. To login to the website, go to the is http://learn.mq.edu.au.
There are also links to advice and assistanceon this web page.
There is a range of other resources available to Macquarie students. See the following URL for more information:
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/support/postresources.htm
Week | Lecture Date | Topic | Lecturer | ||
1 |
TUESDAY 26 Feb |
Introduction to pragmatics. |
JM |
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2 |
5 Mar |
Implicature and the co-operative theory |
JM |
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3 |
12 Mar |
Speech act theory |
JM |
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4 |
19 Mar |
Linguistic politeness |
JM |
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5 |
26 Mar |
Applying linguistic pragmatics to intercultural communication |
JM |
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6 |
2 Apr |
Prosody and communication |
JM |
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7 |
9 Apr |
Conducting research in pragmatics |
JM |
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BREAK |
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8 |
30 April |
Review and extension: informational and interpersonal pragmatics |
JM |
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9 |
7 May |
Pragmatics and discourse |
JM |
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10 |
14 May |
Critical Discourse Analysis: Pragmatics and power |
JM |
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11 |
21 May |
Figurative language, metaphor and culture |
JM |
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12 |
28 May |
Acquiring, teaching and learning pragmatic competence |
JM |
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13 |
4 June |
Review: Applications and directions. |
JM |
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For current updates, lecture times and classrooms, please consult the MQ Timetables website: http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au
Macquarie University policies and procedures are accessible from Policy Central (https://staff.mq.edu.au/work/strategy-planning-and-governance/university-policies-and-procedures/policy-central). Students should be aware of the following policies in particular with regard to Learning and Teaching:
Undergraduate students seeking more policy resources can visit the Student Policy Gateway (https://students.mq.edu.au/support/study/student-policy-gateway). It is your one-stop-shop for the key policies you need to know about throughout your undergraduate student journey.
If you would like to see all the policies relevant to Learning and Teaching visit Policy Central (https://staff.mq.edu.au/work/strategy-planning-and-governance/university-policies-and-procedures/policy-central).
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Results published on platform other than eStudent, (eg. iLearn, Coursera etc.) or released directly by your Unit Convenor, are not confirmed as they are subject to final approval by the University. Once approved, final results will be sent to your student email address and will be made available in eStudent. For more information visit ask.mq.edu.au or if you are a Global MBA student contact globalmba.support@mq.edu.au
Macquarie University provides a range of support services for students. For details, visit http://students.mq.edu.au/support/
Learning Skills (mq.edu.au/learningskills) provides academic writing resources and study strategies to improve your marks and take control of your study.
Students with a disability are encouraged to contact the Disability Service who can provide appropriate help with any issues that arise during their studies.
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Date | Description |
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19/02/2019 | Changes made to assignment dates |