Jef Verschueren - Biography#

Jef Verschueren received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. After a long career as a researcher for the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research, he is now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 2001 to 2009. He is the founder and Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA; https://ipra.uantwerpen.be).

Main interests are theory formation in linguistic pragmatics (conceived broadly as a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language and language use), intercultural and international communication, and language and ideology. Some recent publications include the annually updated Handbook of Pragmatics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins; first published in 1995, co-edited with Jan-Ola Östman, now also available online), Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance (London: Routledge, 1998; co-authored with Jan Blommaert), Understanding Pragmatics (London: Edward Arnold / New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Ideology in Language Use: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research (Cambridge University Press, 2012).