Pragmatics investigates the role of context in the interpretation of meaning. Pragmatics is a relatively young discipline in linguistics starting to develop in the 1970s. This course covers many topics in pragmatics such as deixis, speech acts, conversational implicature, presupposition, conversational analysis, politeness theory, metapragmatics and cultural pragmatics. The student will apply theoretical insights to the design of empirical projects. The ability of launching, conducting and evaluating empirical investigations is crucial in pragmatic research.