This unit introduces students to discourse analysis and semantics. They will build on their knowledge and understanding of grammatical structure to explore the relationship between language and meaning. They will develop a basic understanding of semantics and a methodology for analysing and interpreting text to reveal the communicative intent of the speaker/writer. By the end of the unit students should have an understanding of the nature of human communication to inform language learning and translation practice. Topics: • Communication • Word meaning, including lexical relations and meaning components • Sentence semantics including thematic roles • Spatial reference • Context and inference • Cognitive semantics, metaphor, figurative language • Discourse chunking and charting, genre • Grounding and information structure • Clause combinations • Discourse cohesion and participant reference