István Kecskés is a Distinguished Professor[1] of the State University of New York,[2] USA.
He teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany.
[4] He is the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism (until 2016), and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium (present).
István Kecskés was born on September 20, 1947, in Miskolc, Hungary.
He got his PhD in comparative linguistics from Kossuth University (now Debrecen University), Debrecen, Hungary in 1977 and an academic degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1986.
Kecskés received a Senior Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in the Rockefeller Research Center in Bellagio, Italy in 2004, a Senior Fellowship from the Mitteleuropa Foundation, Bolzano, Italy in 2005, a Honorary Professorship from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou in 2009, a Yunshan Chair Professorship from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China in 2011, a Distinguished Visiting Professorship from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2013 and a Guest Professorship from the University of Messina in May, 2017 and May, 2019.
He was the recipient of the Chancellor's Excellence in Research Award of State University of New York in 2014.
He has been an Honorary Professor at the National Research Tomsk State University, Russia since 2015 where a Graduate Student Award and Scholarship was named after him in 2016.
Kecskés’ book “Foreign language and mother tongue” co-authored by his wife Dr. Tünde Papp and published by Erlbaum in 2000 was the first book that described the effect of the second language on the first language based on a longitudinal research.
In his book “Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2” (De Gruyter, 2003) he introduced the notion of SBU.
Kecskés’ book “Intercultural Pragmatics” (Oxford University Press, 2014) is considered a groundbreaking monograph that shapes research in the field.
[7][8] His new monograph titled “English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatic perspective” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Kecskés is considered to be the founder of the sub-field “intercultural pragmatics”[9][10] and promoter of the socio-cognitive approach with its dynamic model of meaning that combines the intention-based, pragmatic view of cooperation with the cognitive view of egocentrism to incorporate emerging features of communication.
His contribution to pragmatics, linguistics, bilingualism and second language acquisition was recognized by his peers in a Festschrift[11] volume for his 70th birthday, “Doing pragmatics interculturally” edited by Rachel Giora and Michael Haugh[12] and published by De Gruyter in 2017.
[5] Kecskés is the founding editor of the journal “Intercultural Pragmatics” (De Gruyter),[13] the “Mouton Series in Pragmatics”, the bilingual (Chinese-English) journal “CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research)”[4] and the co-founding editor of “Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict” published by John Benjamins (co-founder Pilar Garces Blitvich).
English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatic perspective.
Kecskes, Istvan and Chaofen Sun (eds.)
Key issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research.
Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects.
Kecskes, Istvan and Liliana Albertazzi (eds.)
The role of context in English as a Lingua Franca.
The Socio-cognitive Approach as a Theoretical Frame for Intercultural Pragmatics.
In Kecskes, I. Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics.
Processing implicatures in English as a Lingua Franca communication.
Linguistic Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca," Studies in Pragmatics (The Pragmatics Society of Japan), Vol.
Odd structures in English as a Lingua Franca discourse.
Kecskes, I., Robert E. Sanders and Anita Pomerantz.
The basic interactional competence of language learners.
Activating, seeking and creating common ground: A socio-cognitive approach.
Dueling context: A dynamic model of meaning.