Neal R. Norrick

He held the chair of English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he established a linguistics curriculum firmly based in pragmatics and discourse analysis.

In the last two decades, he has become an important personality in linguistic pragmatics for his pioneering works on humor and narrative in conversational interaction.

He came to Saarbrücken from Northern Illinois University, where he was professor for linguistics and director of graduate studies in the Department of English.

His research specializations in linguistics include conversational narrative,[1][2][3] verbal humor,[4] and tellability.

[6] In recent years, Norrick has focused his research on spoken language, with particular interests in the role of the listener in conversational interaction.