Stephen C. Levinson

Ken Hale Professor

The Ken Hale Chair is supported through a generous matching grant awarded to the Linguistic Society of America by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

LSA 309: Language documentation for cross-linguistic comparison

Stephen C. Levinson holds a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, has taught in linguistics departments at Cambridge and Stanford, and now co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, which has played a special role in developing new models of language documentation. He has undertaken recurrent field research in Tamilnadu, Australia, Mexico and Papua New Guinea and his current research concentrates on the interface between thought and language. He has contributed to theory in pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, semantic typology, linguistic relativity, the cognitive infrastructure for language, and evolutionary approaches to language and culture. He teaches at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and has taught at earlier LSA Institutes in 1987 and 2001. He's the (co-)author or (co-)editor of the following books: Pragmatics (1983), Politeness (1987), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (1996), Presumptive Meanings (2000), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (2001), Space in Language and Cognition (2003), Evolution and Culture (2006), Grammars of Space (2006), Roots of Human Sociality (2006).

External website: http://www.mpi.nl/Members/StephenLevinson