Programme

General part: students are invited to reflect on pragmatics as an interface between language and culture, from an ethno-linguistic perspective. The challenges of intercultural communication are discussed, starting by the comparison between different ways of realizing and interpreting the same speech acts. Issues specifically related to the learning and teaching of pragmatic competence are then addressed.
Focus: some examples of empirical studies on cross-cultural, intercultural and interlanguage pragmatics are presented and discussed.

Core Documentation

- Duranti A., Antropologia del linguaggio, Meltemi 2000.
- Félix-Brasdefer J.C., Declining an invitation: A cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American English and Latin American Spanish, in Multilingua 22(3), 2003, pp. 225-255.
- Garcìa C., Teaching speech act performance: Declining an invitation, in Hispania 79(2), 1996, pp. 267-279.
- Nuzzo E., Fonti di input per l'insegnamento della pragmatica in italiano L2: riflessioni a partire dal confronto tra manuali didattici, serie televisive e parlato spontaneo, in E. Santoro, I. Vedder (a cura di), Pragmatica e interculturalità in italiano lingua seconda, Cesati, 2016, pp. 15-27.