Meaning and Communication

This course is taught in partnership with Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International. 

It  aims to be of value to all those working in the areas of:

• cross-cultural communication
• language development
• literacy
• translation

The course reveals how communication can be improved and why it sometimes fails. Our goal is to help participants integrate these insights into their current and future work. 

The course focuses on the branches of Linguistics often referred to as Semantics and Pragmatics and insights from both Relevance Theory and Cognitive Linguistics structure the course.

The course can be taken directly after the Assignment Related Training module or, more usually, following an 18-24 month first assignment to an initial level role in SIL. Thus the course can be taken as training towards a specialist or consultant role with SIL.

It also forms part of our MA Field Linguistics.

By the end of the course, participants are able to:

• Identify knowledge frames and scripts invoked in a text, as well as event frames, participants (both expressed and unexpressed) and participant roles
• Identify assumptions being communicated by a text (new assumptions, or assumptions being strengthened or weakened, including assumptions not stated in a text but necessary for its interpretation
• Identify enrichment in a text (vagueness, ambiguity, ellipsis and reference), as well as examples of concept narrowing, loose use and echoic use
• Trace how an utterance in the text will typically be enriched by a reader, including implicated premises and implicated conclusions, and the chronological and cause-effect relationships with other assumptions communicated by the text
• Identify the grouping and coherence in a text, and any discourse markers used to mark grouping and coherence
• Identify speech acts in a text
• Identify all examples of prominence in a text, including any linguistic features marking the prominence, and suggest reasons for each example of prominence
• Identify examples of metonymy and metaphor and other lexically-oriented phenomena as analysed in cognitive linguistics, such as basic level categorisation and prototypical effects (including culturally-determined prototypes)

Course dates

Meaning and Communication forms part of the PGDip stage of MA Field Linguistics, which runs from January to June. It can also be studied as a standalone module.

Meaning and Communication runs from 7 - 25 January 2019.

Application deadline as a standalone module: 10 December 2018

For full course dates, please click here: 2019

Tuition Fees

The tuition fees for Meaning and Communication 2019 are £550. 

For more information about course fees and accommodation options, see our fees page.