Jacob L. Mey

Jacob Louis Mey (30 October 1926 – 10 February 2023) was a Dutch-born Danish professor of linguistics, specializing in pragmatics. He was professor emeritus in the Institute of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, after retiring in 1996.

Career Mey received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Copenhagen in 1960, supervised by Louis Hjelmslev. He has also worked at the University of Oslo, the University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, Yale University, Tsukuba University, The National Language Research Institute, Tokyo, Northwestern University, the City University of Hong Kong, the University of Frankfurt, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Universidade de Brasília, the University of Haifa and Haifa Technion, Södertörn University College, and Örebro University. He was chief editor of RASK, the international journal of language and communication, and one of the founding editors of Pragmatics & Society.

Mey originated the notion of the pragmeme. His work with Roger Schank (his former student) and the Yale Artificial Intelligence group in the early 1980s influenced much of the early scientific work in AI on natural language processing.

In 1992 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zaragoza. in recognition of the Journal of Pragmatics’ founding editors’ support for young scholars.

On 30 October 2021, Jacob L. Mey received the IPrA Award for Foundational Service in the Field of Pragmatics from the International Pragmatics Association.

Personal life and death Mey had a daughter from his first marriage with Kari Lothe. He was married to Inger Mey from 1965; they had five children

Selected works Mey, Jacob L. Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice (1979) Rasmus Rask Studies in Pragmatic Linguistics 1. Mey, Jacob L. Whose Language? A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics (1985) Pragmatics & Beyond Companion Series 3. Mey, Jacob L. Pragmatics: An Introduction (1993) . 2nd ed. (2001) Gorayska, Barbara, and Jacob L. Mey. Cognitive technology. Springer London, 1996. Mey, Jacob L. (ed.) Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (1998) Mey, Jacob L. When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics (2000) Trends in Linguistics 115. Mey, Jacob L. and István Kecskés (eds.). Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer (2008) Mouton Series in Pragmatics 4.