This course is not offered every year but I took this course in Fall 2013 with Dr. Michael Kliffer.
According to the course description, it talks about the discussion of the problems confronting the linguist in the study of texts and discourse at the level beyond the sentence. It deals with the interaction between grammar and situational factors. Basically, it talks about how we communicate in our everyday conversations and many people thinks that pragmatics is all about "common sense", it can be about that, but not entirely.
Dr. Kliffer is the prof for this course and even though this is a linguistics course, he is actually a French professor. He is good lecturer and he explains the concepts to you pretty well. He tries to help you in any way possible and always available in his office hours.
The textbook in this course is a must have because the prof gives you questions to answer from after reading them.
The structure of his class is that we have a separate booklet with questions and extra readings we do in the class. The questions in the booklet are all about the readings in the textbook or the extra readings so it is essential to do the readings (literary) because you have to answer questions about them. The prof takes up these questions at the beginning of class for discussion purpose and so we have a better understanding on what we learned in class so far. This is really helpful in studying for quizzes and tests. The other half of the class is the actual lecture where we learn new concept for the next homework questions.
The mark breakdown of this course:
15% Pragmatics Log
20% Quizzes (2 in total = 10% each)
25% Midterm Exam
40% Final Exam
Throughout the semester, you have to find real life examples about the concept we learned in class each week and record it in a pragmatics log. This log is pretty much a book of examples we recorded and we have to explain how each of the examples relates to the concept we talked in class or contradict to the concept (if you happen to find some of those). This whole log is due at the end of the semester, during exam time. When I took the course, we had to find 24 examples and explain all of them. It was a lot of work and it is advisable to not procrastinate with this (like I did, I worked on it the week before) as it will overwhelm you.
The quizzes are all multiple choice questions and it is all about the course content. This is pretty straightforward but you have to study real hard on these ones.
The midterm exam was 4 long answer questions worth 25 points each. The content is pretty much like the quizzes except you have to explain the concept and have to give examples to back up your explanation.
The final exam is the same as the midterm except this was a take-home exam. The prof gives you a couple of weeks to work on it and you have to hand it in to the prof's office. You can't email them...
Overall good course but it is quite difficult to go through (at least for me). It somewhat had some overlaps with other linguistics courses such as Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Slang to Formal Discourse, Syntax, Semantics, and others. So if you took those courses, some of the concepts will be review for you. I recommend this course to all but you have to work hard to get a good mark.
*I'm attaching the course outline for reference.*
