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Department of Philosophy

Directory

Anne Bezuidenhout

Title: Professor
Department: Philosophy & Linguistics
McCausland College of Arts and Sciences
Email: anne1@sc.edu
Office: Close-Hipp 530
Resources: Department of Philosophy 
Linguistics Program 
Department of Psychology
Anne Bezuidenhout

Background

I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1990 and have been employed at the University of South Carolina Department of Philosophy since August 1990. I was promoted to my current rank of Full Professor in 2008. I have been a Core Member of the Linguistics Program since 1992 and I have been an affiliated member of the Institute of Mind and Brain since its inception in 2013.

Research Interests

I work in philosophy of language and on topics at the semantics-pragmatics interface. I am interested in phenomena such as presuppositions and conversational implicatures, which I study using both formal and experimental methods. My experimental pragmatics work has looked at scalar implicatures and at the role that discourse-level information plays in anaphoric pronoun resolution. I am currently interested in the processing of non-restrictive relative clauses (and parentheticals more generally). I am investigating the conditions under which material that is backgrounded/ not-at-issue can become foregrounded/ at-issue. My formal work is focused on perspective taking in conversation and on the notions of foregrounding and backgrounding of information in conversation and in what I call the process of ‘conversational tailoring’. Recently I have argued that speaker intentions and their recognition are essential to referential communication.

Courses Taught AY 2026-27

  • Introduction to Formal Logic I (PHIL 114)
  • Figurative Language (PHIL 370/ LING 405)
  • Introduction to Semantics & Pragmatics (PHIL 522/LING 627)

Recent Publications

  • ‘Lexical pragmatics.’ In Cambridge Companion to Relevance Theory, (Eds.) Billy Clark, Ryoko Sasamoto, and Kate Scott, 2027.
  • ‘Conventional implicatures, at-issue meaning, and presuppositions’. In Cambridge Companion to Grice, (Eds.) Nicholas Allott and Tim Wharton, forthcoming 2027.
  • ‘Intentions in referential communication’. In special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition on Relevance Theory edited by Kate Scott and Ryoko Sasamoto) (under review).
  • ‘Expression meaning vs. speaker meaning’ and ‘Non‑standard language use’. In 3rd edition of The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Editors‑in‑Chief Hilary Nesi and Petar Milin; Section editor Matthieu Fontaine. Elsevier, 2026.
  • ‘The semantics-pragmatics boundary. In C. A. Chapelle, N. Taguchi, & D. Kadar (Eds.),The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 2nd edition: Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
  • ‘Strawson on False Presupposition and the Assertive Enterprise’. In S. Heyndels, A. Bengtson, and B. De Mesel (Eds.), F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy. Oxford University Press, pp. 15-37, 2024
  • (with A. Granger and A. Almor) ‘ARCs and their prominence in discourse’. Proceedings of the Arizona Linguistics Circle, Coyote Papers 24 pp. 50-59, 2022.

Editorial Duties and Service

Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

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