Robert Sanders
Robert E. Sanders (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1971) is Professor of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research is founded on a concern with the interactional basis of assigning pragmatic meaning to utterances and other symbolic conduct, which he accounted for in terms of principles of interactional relevance formalized in his 1987 book, Cognitive foundations of calculated speech. In that book he went on to show how social influence is exerted by producing constraints in interactions (and discourse more broadly) on how one's own and others' symbolic conduct will be interpreted. In various other publications, he has shown the utility of this approach for explaining such matters as interactional goal-attainment, compliance-seeking and persuasion, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication, role-enactment, and the applicability of the "skills" concept in research on language and social interaction. Sanders served as editor of Research on Language and Social Interaction from 1988-1998, and was chair of the Language and Social Interaction divisions of both the National Communication Association and International Communication Association.
Key words:
Pragmatics, speech acts, implicature, relevance,
interaction, interpretation, constraint, goals, social influence, roles,
cross-cultural communication, skills
