Anne Bezuidenhout
anne1@sc.edu
Associate Professor (Philosophy)
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990
Philosophy of language, pragmatics, relevance theory.
Anne Bezuidenhout
anne1@sc.edu
Associate Professor (Philosophy)
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990
Philosophy of language, pragmatics, relevance theory.
Descriptions & Beyond, edited by Marga Reimer
& Anne Bezuidenhout
Published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.
Current Teaching
Trondheim Lextures Sept 18-22, 2006
Research Interests
I am currently working on two major projects:
1. A book manuscript titled ‘Shifting perspectives in language’
2. A project looking at parentheticals from a syntactic, pragmatic and processing
perspective
The first project concerns natural language expressions that in some way encode a perspective point or locus from which matters should be construed. Perspectival expressions include verbs such as ‘come’ and ‘go’, adjectives such as ‘local’ and ‘actual’, indexicals and demonstratives such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’ , these’, ‘those’, etc. The central thesis of this book is that the perspective point associated with such expressions is not necessarily tied to the time and place of the utterance context or to the perspective of the speaker. It can in certain cases be tied to the times and places of remote contexts, or to the perspectives of other agents. This thesis of the shiftability of indexicals and other perspectivals challenges the traditional view that there are no context-shifting operators in natural language. The second project, on parentheticals, is focused mainly on one class of parentheticals, namely non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRs). (E.g., ‘Her father, who was a lawyer, was convicted of perjury’). One large aspect of this project is a series of on-line reading experiments that use the methodology of eye movement monitoring to examine the way in which NRRs are processed in the course of reading. These experiments are aimed at testing the hypothesis that the NRR is not syntactically integrated with the main clause (MC), and that the information contained in the NRR is only integrated with the MC information at a higher discourse or conceptual level.
My work in psycholinguistics is a collaborative enterprise. I work with my colleague Robin Morris, who is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology. Besides our project on parentheticals, we have worked on projects testing the implications of Centering Theory and have also looked at generalized conversational implicatures from a processing perspective, in order to explore the role of default reasoning in the retrieval of such implicatures.