Manfred Krifka#

Short laudatio by Manfred Bierwisch#

Manfred Krifka’s remarkable career is due to his important contributions to various fields of linguistic research, ranging from morphology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics of natural language, from psycholinguistics to Bantu languages and typology in general.

A particular impact of his work comes from contributions to semantics - the core of his interests in several respects. In his first book, Nominalreferenz und Zeitkonstitution. Zur Semantik von Massentermen, Pluraltermen und Aspektklassen, (Miinchen, Fink 1989), he gave for the first time a principled account of a highly intriguing semantic problem: How does the difference in reference of the object of a transitive verb interact with the verb's time structure? Krifka proposed a general and explicit solution to basic puzzles, which had far-reaching consequences for a large number of central issues in descriptive and theoretical semantics. Another major contribution of Krifka's concerns the concept of focus, that is, the interpretation of the emphasized part of an utterance and the way it relates to the background. Krifka's theory of focus has become a cornerstone of the semantics-pragmatics interface. It has, in fact, inspired a growing interest in problems of textual organization and what is now called "Information Structure". This is documented, among others, by the creation of a "Sonderforschungsbreich" on behalf of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Humboldt-University Berlin, where Manfred Krifka is one of the main participants. In his distinct and original manner, Manfred Krifka contributed to a fair number of further issues, ranging from morphological problems of Tok Pisin (a Creole language) to linguistic aspects of high risk communication in the cockpit or to experimental simulation of linguistic change. His numerous articles and research reports, many of them appearing in first rate peer reviewed journals and books, made him an internationally renowned figure of the field.

Because of this reputation, he successfully served for several years as Managing Editor of Linguistics and Philosophy and is now the Editor-in-chief of Theoretical Linguistics, both of which are leading, peer-reviewed periodicals in the field, which clearly profited from his experience and decent style. Another face of his career is Krifka's unpretentious, but highly successful activity as an organizer and supervisor of research and scientific activities. Most importantly, he has been running the Center for General Linguistics and Typology (ZAS) in Berlin for more than four years by now, making it an internationally recognized major place of cooperation in general linguistics. As one of the remarkable effects of Krifka's efforts, one might mention the EU-supported interdisciplinary project "Characterizing Human Language by Structural Complexity", which has participants from Groningen, Manchester, Potsdam, St Andrews, and is coordinated by Krifka and the ZAS.

Krifka is also inventive and successful in gaining broader recognition of linguistics, communicating research results in general journals and publications for a wider public. And above all, Manfred Krifka is a nice and highly stimulating colleague, whom to talk to is always a great pleasure and inspiring experience.

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