Stephen C. Levinson

Publications

Displaying 1 - 8 of 8
  • Levinson, S. C. (2017). Living with Manny's dangerous idea. In G. Raymond, G. H. Lerner, & J. Heritage (Eds.), Enabling human conduct: Studies of talk-in-interaction in honor of Emanuel A. Schegloff (pp. 327-349). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2017). Speech acts. In Y. Huang (Ed.), Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 199-216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.22.

    Abstract

    The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation

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  • Levinson, S. C. (1992). Space in Australian Languages Questionnaire. In S. C. Levinson (Ed.), Space stimuli kit 1.2 (pp. 29-40). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1992). Space in Australian Languages Questionnaire. In S. C. Levinson (Ed.), Space stimuli kit 1.2 (pp. 29-40). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3512641.

    Abstract

    This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1992). Activity types and language. In P. Drew, & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings (pp. 66-100). Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C., Brown, P., Danzinger, E., De León, L., Haviland, J. B., Pederson, E., & Senft, G. (1992). Man and Tree & Space Games. In S. C. Levinson (Ed.), Space stimuli kit 1.2 (pp. 7-14). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.2458804.

    Abstract

    These classic tasks can be used to explore spatial reference in field settings. They provide a language-independent metric for eliciting spatial language, using a “director-matcher” paradigm. The Man and Tree task deals with location on the horizontal plane with both featured (man) and non-featured (e.g., tree) objects. The Space Games depict various objects (e.g. bananas, lemons) and elicit spatial contrasts not obviously lexicalisable in English.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Annamalai, E. (1992). Why presuppositions aren't conventional. In R. N. Srivastava (Ed.), Language and text: Studies in honour of Ashok R. Kelkar (pp. 227-242). Dehli: Kalinga Publications.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1989). Conversation. In E. Barnouw (Ed.), International encyclopedia of communications (pp. 407-410). New York: Oxford University Press.

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