Louis de Saussure - Biography#

Louis de Saussure is full professor of linguistics and discourse analysis at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, since 2007.

He is founder member of the Cognitive Science Centre of the University of Neuchatel and currently head of the department of communication and cognitive science.

He is member of several international scientific boards and acts regularly as expert for scientific funding institutions, including the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Strasbourg (France), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the French High Council for Research and Teaching Evaluation (HCERES), the Agence nationale de la recherche (France), the Research Foundation Flanders (Belgium), the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), among others. He is a former President of the Swiss Linguistics Society and board member of the Council of social sciences policies (Swiss Academy of Human and Social Sciences). He is associate member of the CRISCO research centre of the University of Caen and participates to formal and informal research projects with several partner institutions including the University Complutense of Madrid, the University of Cambridge, the University of Brighton, the University of Athens, the University of Fribourg, the University of Uppsala, the University of Rouen, the University of Rome 3, among others.

He taught and / or pursued research in a number of institutions, among which the University of Texas at Austin where he lectured at the Philosophy Department, University College London (Phonetics and Linguistics dept), University of Lugano (Istituto Semiotico-Linguistico), University of Geneva (Dept of Linguistics), Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

His research on language and language use covers a range of topics including the semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality (TAME) with a contrastive dimension and a particular attention to French, semantic and cognitive pragmatic theory and persuasion studies, emotion in language and the interpretation of non-propositional contents. He delivered 11 keynote conference talks and numerous ordinary talks in international conferences and workshops; he has published extensively: 5 monographs (plus one in progress), 15 edited volumes or special issues of journals, and about 90 journal papers. He regularly makes media appearances.