Your assignment is to answers the following questions as clearly and as accurately as possible. You are not encouraged to use additional material beyond what was covered on the course syllabus, on the lecture slides, or in your discussion sections. However, you must cite all outside material you use in your essay (MLA or Chicago formatting are each acceptable).
Short Answers: Answer three or the following four questions in around 300 words (each question)
1. According to Q. Kukla, what is discursive injustice? What is an example of discursive injustice not mentioned by Kukla or in lecture?
2. According to E. Swanson, what is a common ground path for a discourse and what would it mean for there to be channels for such common ground paths?
3. I. Maitra develops an account of what she calls basic positional authority in a social group. According to Maitra, what is required in order for one agent to have basic positional authority over the other members of a group?
4. E. Camp focuses on the philosophical implications of insinuation. What is one of Camp’s examples of insinuation? What does Camp mean when she claims that insinuations can be speaker meant (e.g. communicated by speakers) without being common ground among the members of a conversation?
Long Answers: Answer two of the following three questions in around 600 words (each question)
5. H.P. Grice developed a pragmatic account of human language use which centered on what he called the cooperative principle. What, according to Grice, is the cooperative principle? Do cases of discursive injustice, conversational silencing, or insinuation provide a good objection to Grice’s claim about the role of the cooperative principle in human language use? How, if at all, should Grice’s claims about the role of the cooperative principle in human language use be revised?
6. In his paper, “Provincialism in Pragmatics” J. Armstrong argues that dynamic pragmatic models of communication apply to other social animals in addition to humans. In developing this claim, Armstrong focuses on the affiliative vocalizations of baboons. What does Armstrong mean when he claims that the affiliative vocalizations of baboons are context-sensitive devices of communication which both depend on the prior state of the social context and serve to update that social context in specific ways? Do you agree that affiliative vocalizations of baboons are context-sensitive in this way? Why or why not?
7. This class has explored the nature of social communication in general, and linguistic communication in particular, through the lens of dynamic pragmatics. What is pragmatics? What does it mean to provide a dynamic approach to pragmatics? Do dynamic approaches to pragmatics provide an illuminating way to understand the ways that humans communicate through the use of language? Why or why not?
