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 have recently been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant bid - 'Searching for relevance'. The project will begin in September 2025. It will generate two journal papers, a book and a video. Moere details will emerge soon.
• I am contributing a chapter on Affectivist Pragmatics to a forthcoming OUP volume on affectivism edited by colleagues from the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Prof David Sander and Danny Dukes and Disa Sauter of the University of Amsterdam.
• Most recently, I 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 with Dr Jagoe and her colleagues, Mirela Conica and Maria Zakaria, we have submitted a paper entitled "Investigating communication support strategies as ‘Micro-interventions’: A conceptual-methodological framework applying realist evaluation and relevance theory" to the International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders
• 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'.
• I have co-authored a chapter with Egyptian researcher Dr Omayma Rezk a chapter entitled 'Relevance theory and emotion' for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Relevance Theory.
• I am writing a chapter with Mengyang Qiu on relevance theory, literature and emotion.
• 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.

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. Dr Chara Vlachaki recently defended her PhD on relevance, aesthetics and ineffability.

I am currently working with students on cognitive science and sound symbolism (Mat Smith); food design and sustainability (Kristin Bullivant); multilingualism and creativity (Natasha Kennedy); the relationship between language and music (Joe Reynolds - Joe began in October 2024 and is a proud recipient of a Techne AHRC Scholarship). Ana Viatova has also recently won a Techne scholarship to work on bridging the gap between affective and linguistic processing in foreign language learners. She joins us officially in October 2025.

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.)