Projects per year
Personal profile
Research interests
I work 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. A recent review of that book is available here.
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.
My research increasingly reflects the cross-disciplinary nature of pragmatics. Indeed, I believe pragmaticists need to work harder to ensure their discipline doesn't become a tired backwater in the philosophy of language or sociolinguistics. A few examples of this cross-disciplinarity:
- I'm currently working on a Leverhulme Research Project Grant bid - 'Searching for relevance' - and editing a book section on emotion and language in an OUP volume on affectivism with colleagues from the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Prof David Sander and Danny Dukes and Disa Sauter of the University of Amsterdam.
- I have recently co-edited an issue of Frontiers in Psychology entitled 'Relevance in Mind' with colleagues from Dublin, Fribourg (Switzerland) and Kingston (UK). The OA editorial is now available here.
- I am editing a CUP Companion Volume on Paul Grice (the finest philosopher of language bar none) with my friend and colleague from the University of Oslo, Nicholas Allott.
- With colleague Dr Caroline Jagoe from Trinity College, Dublin I organised a roundtable event entitled 'Relevance-by-the-Sea' at Brighton on 6 November 2019. A special issue of Journal of Pragmatics, based on talks from the Brighton event, has now been published. This collaboration continues and I am an expert member on the advisory panel, in Dr Jagoe's IRC Laureate Award 'Co-Construct', a project which addresses communication access for people with communicative disabilities. I visited Dublin in September 2024 to deliver a talk and we are currently writing a paper on critical realism and relevance theory which forms part of the wider aims of the project.
- Between October 2018 and 2020, I worked at Brighton with Dr Patricia Kolaiti on a research project: ‘Literature as a Cognitive Object’, funded under a Marie Sklodowska Curie International Fellowship. We are currently under contract with CUP to write a book entitled 'Language, literature and art: the composite organism' which asks what it is about objects with little or no obvious utilitarian function -such as literature, poetry or art- that makes them worth the selective directedness of our mental lives to the point that they have become among the most enduring human cultural representations? We begin work on this book in September 2024.
- I'm currently co-authoring with Egyptian researcher Dr Omayma Rezk a chapter entitled 'Relevance theory and emotion' for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Relevance Theory.
- I am a proud supporter of Kate Scott and Ryoko Sasamoto's Relevance Researchers Network and co-lead a Special Interest Group on Relevance and Emotion there with Chara Vlachaki. The network is also the new home of our weekly UoB Reading for Relevance reading group (formerly ReadLing). The focus is relevance theory, but we read a wide range of interdisciplinary papers.
Supervisory Interests
I have enjoyed working with a number of PhD students on a range of issues: embodiment and metaphor (Dr Alex Golding); the communication of mathematics (Dr Kate McCallum's PhD had a creative practice component); iconicity and sign language (Dr Mary Edward is now a postdoc at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada); the role of prosody in the development of pragmatic competence among L2 learners (Dr Pauline Madella is also a Friends' fan!); using relevance theory to adopting a ‘difference-not-deficit’ approach to language-use among autistic people (Dr Gemma Williams has just published this book); lexical pragmatics and ‘Netspeak’ among Chinese internet users (Dr Chengying Gao, currently based at Wenzhou University, China, and working on a monograph); a dual-route processing model of metaphor comprehension (Dr Mengyang Qiu is currently teaching at Guangxi Medical University in China, but we are doing all we can to get her back to Brighton as a postdoc)
I am currently working with students on relevance, ineffability and aesthetics (Chara Vlachaki); cognitive science and sound symbolism (Mat Smith); food design and sustainability (Kristen Bullivant); multilingualism and creativity (Natasha Kennedy); the relationship between language and music (Joe Reynolds - Joe begins in October 2024 and is a proud recipient of a Techne AHRC Scholarship).
All of these reflect the interest I have in territories beyond those linguists and pragmatists traditionally seek to explore.
Specific areas of enquiry for PhD supervision include, but are not limited to:
- Pragmatics
- Relevance theory
- Non-verbal communication (including prosody)
- Expressive meaning
- Emotions and the communication of emotion
- Pragmatics and cognitive science
Please contact me if you feel you have a PhD proposal which you think I might be interested in. (And please call me 'Tim', because that's my name.)
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
Projects
- 1 Finished
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CL: MSCA-IF Literature and Art as a Cognitive Object
Wharton, T. (PI) & Kolaiti, P. (PI)
24/10/18 → 23/10/20
Project: Grant
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Language, literature and art: The composite organism
Wharton, T. & Kolaiti, P., 1 Jan 2024, (Accepted/In press) Cambridge University Press. 300 p.Research output: Book/Report › Book - authored › peer-review
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Non-verbal communication and context: Multi-modality in interaction
Wharton, T. & Madella, P., 1 Jan 2024, The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context. Romero-Trillo, J. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 419-436 17 p. 19Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBN › Chapter › peer-review
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Relevance theory and communication atypicalities
Wharton, T. & Ifantidou, E., 8 Jan 2024, The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics. Ball, M., Müller, N. & Spencer, E. (eds.). 2nd ed. John Wiley and Sons, p. 31-41 10 p. (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics).Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBN › Chapter › peer-review
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Editorial: Relevance in Mind
Wharton, T., Scott, K., Maillat, D. & Jagoe, C., 30 Nov 2023, In: Frontiers in Psychology. 14, 2 p., 1338336.Research output: Contribution to journal › Editorial › peer-review
Open Access -
Pragmatics and Emotion
Wharton, T. & de Saussure, L., 21 Dec 2023, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 250 p.Research output: Book/Report › Book - authored › peer-review