Best Pragmatics
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 prominent German linguist and academic specializing in formal semantics, pragmatics, and information structure. He has served as a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin, where he directed the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS). His extensive research on focus and natural l...
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist and a professor at the Australian National University. Since the 1970s, she has been the principal developer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory, which proposes that all human languages share a universal core of semantic concepts. Her res...
Deirdre Wilson is a British linguist and emeritus professor of linguistics at University College London. With French anthropologist and philosopher Dan Sperber, she developed relevance theory, a cognitive-pragmatic account of utterance interpretation first presented in their 1986 book Relevance: Com...
Cliff Goddard is an Australian linguist and leading Natural Semantic Metalanguage scholar, elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2003.
