Tim Wharton

I am an academic working in pragmatics, the study of utterance interpretation. In particular, I explore the way ‘natural’, non-linguistic behaviours – tone of voice, facial expressions, gesture – interact with the linguistic properties of utterances (broadly speaking, the words we say). My earliest published views on ‘natural pragmatics’ are outlined in a 2009 book, Pragmatics and Non-Verbal Communication, which charts a point of contact between pragmatics, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, ethology and psychology. In recent years I have been greatly influenced by work in affective science on the elicitation, experience and expression of emotion, and this has resulted in subtle changes to my early hypotheses. My latest book – Pragmatics and Emotion – was published by CUP in December last year and outlines some of the challenges that need to be surmounted in order to accommodate emotions in cognitive pragmatics. I have also become increasingly interested in aesthetics and the way humans perceive, not to say ‘feel’, artworks – in particular, music. As a singer-songwriter I enjoy very much the way the intellectual and artistic threads of my life intertwine.