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Meaning and Communication

Build on your knowledge and experience of language and learn about how language communicates meaning.

Why study this course?
Objectives
Dates and fees

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.

Participants will conduct an in-depth investigation of how these two theories help us understand how languages communicate through utterances, texts and words. They will also have the opportunity to apply what they are discovering to texts and to our experience of real language use.

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.

The usual entry requirements for a Redcliffe College postgraduate level course apply.

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