PHIL 390
Discourse Dynamics Spring 2023
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed COGS 390
This is not the current course catalog

It’d be perfectly natural to say “I might’ve left the stove on”, then check the stove, then say “I didn’t leave the stove on”. But perform those exact same steps in a different order–check the stove, say “I didn’t leave the stove on”, then say “I might’ve left the stove on”–and something’s gone quite wrong. Conversation is dynamic–the back and forth exchange of information is a process that grows and adapts to the surrounding context. The order in which you say things matters, and it matters for what you communicate what actions you take and what events happen around you. In this course, we will investigate dynamic communicative phenomena and discuss competing theoretical explanations about how they’re interpreted. Of particular interest will be the extent to which discourse dynamics are built into the meanings of linguistic expressions vs. the extent to which they’re consequences of our rational cognition. Is a sentence’s relation to previously uttered sentences similar to its relation to extra-linguistic events? How much inference goes into interpreting what’s said? In pursuing the answers to these questions, we will discuss both classic and contemporary theories from philosophy and linguistics.