Stephen Levinson
British social scientist
title: "Stephen Levinson" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1947-births", "living-people", "people-educated-at-bedales-school", "alumni-of-king's-college,-cambridge", "university-of-california,-berkeley-alumni", "21st-century-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", "members-of-academia-europaea", "social-scientists-from-london"] description: "British social scientist" topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Levinson" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary British social scientist ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox academic"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Stephen Levinson |
| honorific_suffix | FBA |
| birth_name | Stephen Curtis Levinson |
| birth_date | |
| birth_place | London, UK |
| occupation | Social scientist |
| spouse | Penelope Brown |
| education | King's College, Cambridge |
| University of California, Berkeley | |
| workplaces | University of Cambridge |
| Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics | |
| thesis_title | Social Deixis in a Tamil Village |
| thesis_year | 1977 |
| thesis_url | https://www.proquest.com/docview/288076875 |
| :: |
| name = Stephen Levinson | honorific_suffix = FBA | image = | caption = | birth_name = Stephen Curtis Levinson | birth_date = | birth_place = London, UK | death_date = | death_place = | occupation = Social scientist | spouse = Penelope Brown | alma_mater = | education = King's College, Cambridge University of California, Berkeley | influences = | workplaces = University of Cambridge Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics | thesis_title = Social Deixis in a Tamil Village | thesis_year = 1977 | thesis_url = https://www.proquest.com/docview/288076875 | notable_works = | notable_ideas = | influenced = | signature = | signature_size = | footnotes = Stephen Curtis Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947) is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Levinson was born in London, England and educated at Bedales School and King's College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in Archaeology and Social Anthropology, and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology. He has held posts at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University and the Australian National University, and is currently Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University. In December 2017, he retired as director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 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, studying the interaction patterns in a multilingual community in India. He has written extensively on pragmatics, producing the first comprehensive textbook in the field (1983). He locates his work on pragmatics under what he has called the Gricean umbrella (2000:12ff.), a broad theory of communication that focuses on the role of conversational implicatures. His work with Penelope Brown 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.
From 1991 onward Levinson has led his own research lab, funded by the Max Planck Society and based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. 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 and new models of language documentation. LSA 2009, L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials In 2009, Levinson co-wrote (with Nicholas Evans) a hotly debated article contesting the existence of non-trivial linguistic universals and arguing that linguistic diversity is a crucial datum for cognitive science. The department has also done work connecting typology with Conversation Analysis 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.
Levinson was one of the driving forces behind a re-evaluation of the notion of linguistic relativity 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 linguistic relativity 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, and their Yélî Dnye language.
References cited and notable publications
- {{Cite book | publisher = Cambridge University Press | isbn = 0-521-22235-4 | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. | title = Pragmatics | location = Cambridge | series = Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics | year = 1983 | url = https://archive.org/details/pragmatics00levi
- {{Cite book | publisher = Cambridge University Press | isbn = 0-521-30862-3 | last = Brown | first = Penelope | author2 = Stephen C. Levinson | title = Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage | location = Cambridge | series = Studies in interactional sociolinguistics | year = 1987 | url = https://archive.org/details/politenesssomeun00brow
- {{Cite journal | volume = 34 | issue = 3 | pages = 22–23 | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. |author2=Penelope Brown | title = Background to "Immanuel Kant among the Tenejapans" | journal = Anthropology Newsletter | year = 1993
- {{Cite journal | volume = 22 | issue = 1 | pages = 3–41 | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. |author2=Penelope Brown | title = Immanuel Kant among the Tenejapans: Anthropology as empirical philosophy | journal = Ethos | year = 1994 | jstor=640467 | doi=10.1525/eth.1994.22.1.02a00010 | hdl = 11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2BBD-2 | hdl-access = free
- {{Cite book | publisher = MIT Press | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. | title = Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature | year = 2000
- {{Cite book | publisher = Cambridge University Press | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. | title = Space in language and cognition: explorations in cognitive diversity | location = Cambridge | year = 2003
- {{Cite journal | doi = 10.1017/S0140525X0999094X | pmid = 19857320 | volume = 32 | issue = 5 | pages = 429–492 | last = Evans | first = Nicholas |author2=Stephen C. Levinson | title = The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science | journal = Behavioral and Brain Sciences | year = 2009 | doi-access = free | hdl = 11858/00-001M-0000-0012-C29E-4 | hdl-access = free
- {{Cite journal | issn = 0011-3204 | volume = 32 | issue = 5 | pages = 613–623 | last = Gumperz | first = John J. |author2=Stephen C. Levinson | title = Rethinking Linguistic Relativity | journal = Current Anthropology | date = December 1991 | jstor=2743696 | doi=10.1086/204009 | s2cid = 162295567 | url = http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1552158/component/escidoc:1552157/Levinson_Rethinking_Linguistic_Relativity_1991.pdf
- {{Cite book | publisher = MIT Press | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. |author2=Pierre Jaisson | title = Evolution and culture | location = Cambridge, MA | year = 2006
- {{Cite book | publisher = Cambridge University Press | last = Levinson | first = Stephen C. |author2=David P. Wilkins | title = Grammars of space | location = Cambridge | year = 2006
References
References
- [http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whoswho/U24384 LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis], ''Who's Who 2014'', A & C Black, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014
- "Stephen Levinson CV".
- "History Timeline | Max Planck Institute".
- "Faculty of Languages appoints two new honorary doctors - Uppsala University, Sweden".
- "International Pragmatics Association (IPrA): Organization".
- Dingemanse M, Roberts SG, Baranova J, Blythe J, Drew P, Floyd S. (2015). "Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.". PLOS ONE.
- Kendrick KH, Brown P, Dingemanse M, Floyd S, Gipper S, Hayano K, Hoey E, Hoymann G, Manrique E, Rossi G, Levinson SC. (2020). "Sequence organization: A universal infrastructure for social action". Journal of Pragmatics.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::