Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Prerequisites: HISP-S 326 or consent of the department.

Topic: Pragmatics: Language in context (Spanish Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics)

The objective of this course is to examine language use in context (pragmatics) and sociolinguistic variation across regions in Latin America and Spain, including linguistic and social influence of indigenous languages spoken in Latin American in modern Spanish. The first part of the course covers the foundational concepts of pragmatics: meaning, context, speech acts, politeness/impoliteness, and discourse analysis. This course will look at grammatical concepts (conditional, subjunctive, negation, preterit/imperfect, word order, etc.) from a pragmatic perspective using data from native and non-native speakers. The second part of the course applies these notions to pragmatic and sociolinguistic variation by examining the effect of social factors (e.g. region, age, social class) on communicative language use. We will analyze data in Spanish from different sources such as colloquial conversation, institutional discourse, and controlled settings using oral and written questionnaires. Finally, students will learn the principles for writing a research paper.

HISP-S 429     #12708    2:20P-3:35P     MW      SY 212    Prof. César Félix-Brasdefer

Note: This class meets with HISP-S 498 (13249)

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