Stephen C. Levinson

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Stephen C. Levinson is director of the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received a BA in Archaeology and Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of California Berkeley. He has held posts at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University and the Australian National University.

His most influential publication is probably Politeness: Universals in Language Usage which he co-authored with Penelope Brown and which was a seminal work in Politeness theory.

He has written extensively on pragmatics, and in particular, furthered the work of Paul Grice on conversational implicature. He describes his theories as being 'under the Gricean umbrella'.

[edit] Notable publications

(1987) Politeness: Universals in Language Usage (with Penelope Brown).
(1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
(1996) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (ed. with John Gumperz) Cambridge: CUP.
(2000) Presumptive Meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT.
(2001) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (ed. with M. Bowerman). Cambridge: CUP
(2003) Spatial Language and Cognition. Cambridge: CUP