Spanish 790U - Updating Facts, Persona, Power

In conversation, we negotiate information regarding facts about the world, and facts about ourselves, but also regarding the power relations holding between interlocutors. Linguistic devices are used to convey factual-knowledge or request factual-information, but also to establish who we are and our stance regarding others. In this class we will explore speech acts, dynamic models of context update, and the different ways in which we gain or transfer information about many aspects of the world and of us. Some ways are more subtle, information being merely and dangerously insinuated, some are more blunt and, maybe because of that, perhaps less effective for some purposes. The goal of this class is to investigate the formal tools at our disposal to understand these negotiations and their limits.