Stephen Levinson

Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947) is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, currently one of the scientific directors of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Levinson was educated at Bedales School and King's College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in Archaeology and Social Anthropology, and University of California Berkeley where he received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology. He has held posts at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University and the Australian National University, and is currently Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University. Among other distinctions, he is winner of the 1992 Stirling Prize, Fellow-elect of the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, member of the Academia Europaea, and 2009 Hale Professor of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2017 Levinson received an honorary doctorate award from Uppsala University.

Levinson's earliest work was with John Gumperz in interactional sociolinguistics, studying the interaction patterns in a multilingual community in India. He has written extensively on pragmatics, producing the first comprehensive textbook in the field (1983). He locates his work on pragmatics under what he has called the Gricean umbrella (2000:12ff.), a broad theory of communication that focuses on the role of conversational implicatures. His work with Penelope Brown on language structures related to formality and politeness across the world led to the publication of Politeness: Universals in Language Usage (1978/1987), a foundational work in Politeness theory.

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