Stephen Levinson

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Stephen Levinson
Born
Stephen Curtis Levinson

1947
NationalityBritish
OccupationSocial scientist
SpousePenelope Brown
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Academic work
InstitutionsMax Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947)[1] is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Levinson was educated at

Radboud University. In December 2017, he retired as director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.[2] 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.[3] He is the current president of the International Pragmatics Association.[4]

Career

Levinson's earliest work was with

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
.

From 1991 onward Levinson has led his own research lab, funded by the

Conversation Analysis through studies on e.g. repair[5] and sequence organization[6] across a wide variety of language. This has also led to lesser studied languages being taken into account in Interactional linguistics
.

Levinson was one of the driving forces behind a re-evaluation of the notion of

Yélî Dnye language
.

References cited and notable publications

References

  1. ^ a b LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis, Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014
  2. ^ "History Timeline | Max Planck Institute". www.mpi.nl.
  3. ^ "Faculty of Languages appoints two new honorary doctors - Uppsala University, Sweden".
  4. ^ "International Pragmatics Association (IPrA): Organization".
  5. PMID 26375483.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  6. S2CID 224867809.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )

External links