This course provides detailed analysis of the socio-pragmatics of three East Asian (EA) languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Socio-pragmatics refers to the interface between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, in other words, the study of how language may vary according to social context and how language is used to express social meanings.

The course covers four important sub-fields: (im)politeness, speech acts, conversation analysis, and the acquisition of socio-pragmatics by second language learners. A key concern will be to esablish how similar or different the socio-pragmatics of Chinese, Japanese and Korean may be.

The goals of the class are as follows: (1) students will understand key theories and concepts in socio-pragmatics, (2) students will understand how these theories/concepts relate to EA languages, and (3) students will gain expertise in researching the socio-pragmatics of EA languages.