Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
A graduate-level MIT OpenCourseWare course rounding out the department's three-part semantics sequence, following 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.973 Advanced Semantics. The course splits into two main units: conversational implicature, with emphasis on scalar implicatures, and presupposition. Each unit introduces the core concepts and technical tools linguists use to analyze meaning beyond literal content, then turns to recent research papers that apply and test those tools. Materials include lecture notes, readings, and problem sets typical of MIT's linguistics graduate curriculum. The course assumes prior training in formal semantics and is aimed at students who already know basic compositional semantics and want to see how pragmatic reasoning interacts with it. No tuition or certificate fee applies; materials are freely published under MIT OpenCourseWare's open license.