Jacques Moeschler is emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Specialized in semantics and pragmatics, he wrote and published about 30 books and more than 200 scientific articles, mainly devoted to semantic and pragmatic topics like negation, tenses, temporal relations in discourse, logical and discourse connectives, causality and causal connectives, as well as theoretical issues like implicatures, presuppositions and the semantics-pragmatics interface.
He recently published five books in French and English: Non-Lexical Pragmatics: Time, Causality and Logical Words (2019, Mouton de Gruyter); with Sandrine Zufferey and Anne Reboul Implicatures (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Why Language? What Pragmatics Tells Us About Language and Communication (Mouton de Gruyter, 2021), adapted from Pourquoi le langage? (Armand Colin, 2020); Language and Truth: What Makes Communication Reliable in a Post-Truth World (Routledge, 2024), adapted from Langage et vérité (Éd. Lambert-Lucas, 2023); and with Sandrine Zufferey Studying Meaning: Semantics and Pragmatics (Routledge, 2025), adapted from Initiation à l’étude du sens (Éditions Sciences Humaines, 2024, 2nd ed).
Jacques Moeschler’s current interest is about, agnotology, i.e. the making and unmaking of ignorance, more specifically the role of ignorance and doubt in verbal communication and its effects on comprehension, trust, reliability and the common ground required to warrant successful communication. This topic is complementary to his approach of lying, fake news and bullshitting, developed from a pragmatic perspective in his book on language and truth. His main goal is nowadays outreaching pragmatic concepts used in the understanding of language use and the world.
Web site: https://sites.google.com/site/moeschlerjacques/home
