Week 11 Workshop: What goes without saying

The last building workshop. Context-dependent meaning, one thing your language cannot express without a paraphrase, and the first read-through of your crit text

6 May 2027

Before the session#

Watch “Darmok”. It is a single episode and the only television on this course; it is here because it illustrates the week’s material more directly than any film does.

Draft your crit text. Twelve lines minimum. It can be anything — a passage, a list, an argument, a set of instructions — provided it is a text your speakers would plausibly produce rather than a demonstration of your grammar.

In the session#

Half the session on implicature. You write three utterances that mean something other than what they say, and state the context that makes each one work. This is much harder than it sounds, and it is the clearest way to tell whether you have built a society as well as a grammar.

Then the gap. Every language has something it expresses awkwardly — a distinction it cannot make without a long paraphrase. Find yours and write it down. You are not penalised for this; every language examined closely enough turns out to have gaps.

The last half hour is reading aloud, in pairs. First time out loud, in front of one person, with a week left to fix what you find.

Afterwards#

Fix what the read-through exposed. Do not add anything new — you are eight days from the crit, and at this stage new material causes more problems than it solves.