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.
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.