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Gruppe 1 (Imamovic): Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics This course introduces students to the main concepts and methods in English Semantics and Pragmatics. It explores how meaning is created and interpreted in communication, focusing on both literal and implied meanings. We will cover key topics such as Gricean Maxims, speech act theory, implicature, context and language, figurative language, Politeness theory, and Appraisal theory. Students will learn how speakers use language to convey meaning beyond words, manage interpersonal relationships and achieve communicative goals. Students will apply these concepts to Discourse Analysis in English, with contrastive examples from German or other languages they speak. This comparative approach will help students recognise how meaning varies across languages and contexts.
The course will equip students with:
• A solid understanding of fundamental principles in English semantics and pragmatics
• Analytical tools for interpreting meaning, inference, and speaker intention
• The ability to apply pragmatic theory to short texts and real language examples
• Comparative insights into discourse practices in English and other languages.
Assessment:
• Presentation: Poster presentation analysing a chosen English text from a semantic/pragmatic perspective
• Written Exam: Final exam assessing theoretical understanding and analytical/practical application of concepts learned.
All required materials will be uploaded to Learnweb. The course requires students to bring their laptops to class and to actively participate in pair and group work sessions. Gruppe 2 (Lapshinova): Contrasting English and German through Corpora In this course, we will cover different aspects of corpus-based analysis regarding systemic and textual contrasts between English and German, i.e. comparing these two languages on various linguistic levels with the help of linguistic corpora. Our special focus will lie on lexico-grammatical, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic phenomena that might cause difficulties in the translation process. We will also learn about possibilities to use corpora and further resources to search for these phenomenal and to extract them from linguistic corpora. Corpus linguistics offers a broad spectrum of methodologies for contrastive linguistics and translation. The application of corpus resources will be illustrated with selected research questions relevant to the comparison of languages and to translation studies. We will see how issues related to language contrasts and translation can be solved with corpus-based methods. The course will provide theoretical insights as well as practical experience. Students will work on small projects on a selected topic (team work is possible).The topics of the projects will include differences between English and German, as well as differences in original texts and translations (translation strategies). We will work much with electronic resources. The course materials are available in the Learnweb.
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