Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947)LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis
''Who's Who 2014'', A & C Black, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014 is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between

culture Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

and

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, though ...

, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics ( German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located ...

Nijmegen Nijmegen (;; Spanish and it, Nimega. Nijmeegs: ''Nimwèège'' ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole, located on the Waal river close to the German border. It is about 6 ...

, the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. Levinson was educated at

Bedales School Bedales School is a co-educational, boarding and day independent school in the village of Steep, near the market town of Petersfield in Hampshire, England. It was founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley in reaction to the limitations of con ...

and

King's College, Cambridge King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the cit ...

, where he received a BA in Archaeology and Social Anthropology, and

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

where he received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology. He has held posts at the University of Cambridge,

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

and the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...

, and is currently Professor of Comparative Linguistics at

Radboud University Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, nl, Radboud Universiteit , formerly ''Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen'') is a public research university located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The university bears the name of Saint Radboud, a 9th century D ...

. In December 2017, he retired as director of the Language and Cognition department at the

. 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. He is the current president of the International Pragmatics Association.

Career

Levinson's earliest work was with John Gumperz in

interactional sociolinguistics Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. Tannen, Deborah (2006). Language and culture. In R.W. Fasold and J. Connor Linton (ed ...

, studying the interaction patterns in a multilingual community in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

. He has written extensively on

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

, producing the first comprehensive textbook in the field (1983). He locates his work on pragmatics under what he has called the

Grice The grice was a breed of swine found in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and in Ireland. Culley, George(1807), ''Observations on Livestock'', pub Wilkie, Robinson et al, p 176/ref> It became extinct, surviving longest in the Shetland Isle ...

an umbrella (2000:12ff.), a broad theory of communication that focuses on the role of

conversational implicature In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly sayi ...

s. His work with

Penelope Brown Penelope Brown (born 1944 in Summit, NJ) is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition. Education and career Brown earned ...

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 Politeness theory, proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, centers on the notion of politeness, construed as efforts on redressing the affronts to a person's self-esteems or effectively claiming positive social values in Social inter ...

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

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...

and based at the

. Work in his Language and Cognition group (formerly Cognitive Anthropology research group) focuses on linguistic diversity and its importance to cognitive science. The group has played a pioneering role in developing the field of

semantic typology Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

and new models of language documentation
LSA 2009L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials
In 2009, Levinson co-wrote (with

Nicholas Evans Nicholas Benbow Evans (26 July 1950 – 9 August 2022) was a British journalist, screenwriter, television and film producer and novelist. Biography Nicholas Benbow Evans was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, son of Anthony Evans, director of ...

) a hotly debated article contesting the existence of non-trivial

linguistic universals A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research i ...

and arguing that linguistic diversity is a crucial datum for cognitive science. The department has also done work connecting

typology Typology is the study of types or the systematic classification of the types of something according to their common characteristics. Typology is the act of finding, counting and classification facts with the help of eyes, other senses and logic. Ty ...

with

Conversation Analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with ...

through studies on e.g. repair and sequence organization across a wide variety of language. This has also led to lesser studied languages being taken into account in

Interactional linguistics Interactional linguistics (IL) is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the field of linguistics, that applies the methodology of Conversation Analysis to the study of linguistic structures, including syntax, phonetics, phonol ...

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

linguistic relativity The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people ...

in the early nineties, publishing (with Gumperz) an influential review of the issue (''Current Anthropology'', 1991) and co-editing (with Gumperz) a volume on the topic with contributions of experts from various fields (Gumperz & Levinson 1996). An influential paper with Penelope Brown titled ''Immanuel Kant among the Tenejapans: Anthropology as Empirical Philosophy'' won the 1992 Stirling Award of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Levinson's work on language and space (Levinson & Brown 1993, Levinson 2003, 2006) demonstrated a form of

by showing that speakers of languages which use different spatial systems solve non-verbal spatial tasks in distinct ways. His recent work describes the relations between culture of the inhabitants of

Rossel Island Rossel Island (named after de Rossel, a senior officer on the French expedition of d'Entrecasteaux, 1791-1793; also known as Yela) is the easternmost island of the Louisiade Archipelago, within the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. Tree Isl ...

, and their

Yélî Dnye language The Yele language, or ''Yélî Dnye'', is the language of Rossel Island, the easternmost island in the Louisiade Archipelago off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea. There were some 4,000 speakers in 1998, comprising the entire ethnic population ...

References cited and notable publications

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References

External links

Levinson's MPI homepage

List of publications
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levinson, Stephen Curtis 1947 births Living people People educated at Bedales School Alumni of King's College, Cambridge University of California, Berkeley alumni British social scientists Fellows of the British Academy Linguists of Papuan languages Linguists of East Papuan languages Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Max Planck Institute directors