Franz Rainer#
A short laudatio by Ferenc Kiefer#
The focus of Franz Rainer’s scholarly work has always been on French, Italian and Spanish, with occasional excursions into Portuguese, German and English.
Rainer’s habilitation work was devoted to word formation, which was to remain his main area of specialisation. For one decade (1983-1993), he worked on a comprehensive synchronic treatise of Spanish word formation, which has become the standard handbook of the discipline (Rainer 1993), the best existing work of this type we know of. It is in the process of being translated (and supplemented) into Spanish.
The lack of similar treatises for other Romance languages was strongly felt by scholars in the field. Rainer’s next important enterprise (together with Maria Grossmann) was a collective volume La formazione delle parole in italiano, which has become the standard handbook of synchronic Italian word formation (Grossmann/Rainer 2004). Beside acting as an editor, Rainer also contributed the theoretical introduction and six large descriptive chapters to this collective volume.
Apart from the descriptive work which materialised in these two volumes and a series of articles, Rainer has always had a keen interest in theoretical aspects of word formation. A central concern of his theoretical work have been the related problems of productivity and restrictions. His results were widely diffused through articles such as Rainer (1986) on the notion of productivity, Rainer (1988) on blocking, or Rainer (2000, 2005a) on restrictions.
During the last decade, his main research interest in word formation has shifted to diachrony. One central phenomenon which he has focused on are the mechanisms of change in word formation (cf Rainer 2003), which he has shown to differ from lexical change. Another focus of his recent work is on the influence of Neo-Latin on the development of word formation and terminology in European languages (cf Rainer 2008), which is still grossly underestimated. But the main result of this diachronic phase has been a new theory of the evolution of Latin agent nouns in -or in Romance. Contrary to the commonly held belief, popularised by W. Meyer-Lübke in the 1890s, Rainer has been able to show that the instrumental meaning of the corresponding Romance suffixes was not due to semantic extension, but to a complex interplay of causes, varying from language to language and including homonymisation of L. -oriu and L. -or, ellipsis, borrowing and analogy.
In his latest contribution to word formation, Rainer has ventured into a new field, viz. language acquisition. His most recent work is a monographic treatment of the acquisition of German word formation. The monograph, whose results corroborate the findings of recent usage-based theories of language, has just been accepted for publication by the Austrian Academy of Science.
When Rainer became full professor at WU Vienna, the largest business school in Europe, he diversified his research into a field closer to his actual host institution than word formation, specialising on the history of economic terminology, a heavily underresearched area. He is currently engaged in writing a monograph on the history of the metaphoric field of LIQUID MONEY in five European languages.
Rainer is one of the leading specialist on word—formation worldwide. Both his empirical word and his theoretical contribution are groundbreaking.
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