Penelope Brown

Penelope Brown (born 1944 in Summit, NJ) is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition.

Education and career[edit]

Brown earned a BA in Psychology from Carleton College 1965 and an M.A. in Anthropology and Linguistics from the University of Iowa in 1970. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 under the supervision of John J. Gumperz. Her dissertation is titled, "Language, interaction, and sex roles in a Mayan community: a study of politeness and the position of women."

Brown was the co-developer of the theory of politeness, a key topic in 20th century sociolinguistics. With her research collaborator and husband, linguist Stephen Levinson, she is co-author of the seminal work, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage^[1][2] (cited more than 30,000 times). This book was first published in 1978 (and was republished with a new introduction, corrections, and a new bibliography in 1987^[3]).

Brown worked in the field for a number of years with Tzeltel Maya speakers in Mexico, and has also worked in Rossel Island in Papua New Guinea.^[4]

She is currently an emeritus member of the Language Acquisition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.

Honors and awards[edit]

She earned the Stirling Prize for Best Work in Psychological Anthropology in 1992.^[5]

Key publications[edit]

• Tanya Stivers, N.J. Enfield, Penolpe Brown, Christina Englert, Makoto Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, Gertie Hoymann, Federico Rossano, Jan Peter de Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon. and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
• Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown (eds.) 2008. Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure. Taylor and Francis.
• Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
• Penelope Brown. 1980. How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. Women and language in literature and society. Preager Publishers. pp. 111–136.
• Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. Questions and politeness: strategies in social interaction. Cambridge University Press. pp. 56–311.
• Gillian Sankoff and Penelope Brown. 1976. The origins of syntax in discourse: A case study of Tok Pisin relatives. Language 52:3 pp. 631–666.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• CV at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics