Best Pragmatics
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H. Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language whose work formed the foundation of modern pragmatics. He is best known for introducing the cooperative principle and the concept of conversational implicature, which he detailed in his 1975 paper 'Logic and Conversation.' To explain how speakers c...
John L. Austin (1911–1960) was a British philosopher of language and a leading figure in ordinary language philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his theory of speech acts, which proposes that language is used not just to describe the world but to perform actions. His ideas wer...
Michael Silverstein (1945–2020) was an American linguistic anthropologist who taught at the University of Chicago for his entire career. He is known for contributions to metapragmatics, the concept of indexical order, and the study of language ideologies. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship...
Stephen C. Levinson is a British linguist known for his contributions to pragmatics, linguistic relativity, and cognitive anthropology. He co-authored the 1987 book "Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage" with Penelope Brown. He has served as the director of the Language and Cognition Group...
Laurence R. Horn is an American linguist and a professor emeritus at Yale University. He is highly regarded in the field of linguistics for his extensive research on pragmatics, semantics, negation, and scalar implicature. Horn is perhaps best known for formulating the Horn scales, which describe ho...
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist born in 1942, currently Emeritus Director of Research at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. He is best known for developing relevance theory with British linguist Deirdre Wilson, first presented in their 1986 book Relevance: Communication and Cog...
Manfred Krifka is a German linguist, known for work on semantics, pragmatics, information structure, and focus at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist known for Natural Semantic Metalanguage, developed at ANU from the 1970s.
Deirdre Wilson is a British linguist and pragmatist known for relevance theory, co-developed with Dan Sperber in the 1986 book Relevance.
Cliff Goddard is an Australian linguist and leading Natural Semantic Metalanguage scholar, elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2003.
