Our course will focus on three areas where features of discourse context interface with syntactic representation:

• The structuring or pragmatic use of propositional content by the speaker (information structure, illocutionary force, evidentiality);  
• The syntactic and semantic encoding of speaker and addressee (indexicality, logophoricity);
• The syntactic and semantic encoding of the relation between  speaker and  addressee (politeness, honorification).

These three areas will be introduced via reading and discussion of important primary literature.  An important theme of the discussions will be notion of main clause phenomena, and we will focus on data from languages including Basque, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Amharic.  We will make a special effort to unpack and evaluate both the syntactic and the semantic assumptions and tools employed in the literature we examine.  This will allow us to work towards a state-of-the-art framework for theorizing about the syntax and semantics of discourse oriented features.