Manfred Krifka (born 26 April 1956 in Dachau) is a German linguist. He is the director of the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, ZAS) in Berlin, a professor at the

Humboldt University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...

, and editor of the academic journal ''

Theoretical Linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the n ...

''. See staff bio and journal web pages in External links below.

Career and education

Krifka graduated from the

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...

in 1986 in Theoretical Linguistics, Philosophy and Theory of Science, and Psycholinguistics. He consequently held positions at the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Wü ...

1986 - 1989, at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

1990 - 2000, and at

2000 - current. He has been the director of the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) since 2001.

Work

Krifka's main areas of research are linguistic

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

language typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

and

Melanesian languages In linguistics, Melanesian is an obsolete term referring to the Austronesian languages of Melanesia: that is, the Oceanic, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, or Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages apart from Polynesian and Micronesian. A typi ...

, especially languages of

Ambrym Ambrym is a volcanic island in Malampa Province in the archipelago of Vanuatu. Volcanic activity on the island includes lava lakes in two craters near the summit. Etymology Ambrym (also known as ''Ambrin'', ''"ham rim"'' in the Ranon language ...

. He has done substantial works on the meaning of

nouns A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

, in particular

mass nouns In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elemen ...

and count nouns, on

grammatical aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to ...

, generic sentences,

polarity items In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic ...

information structure In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Information structure and sentence form.'' Cambridge: Cambridge Univer ...

questions A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...

and

speech acts Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are th ...

Notes and references

Bibliography

* Krifka, Manfred (1998).
The Origins of Telicity
. Pages 197–235 in S. Rothstein (ed.). ''Events and grammar''. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.

External links

Manfred Krifka
— official staff page at ZAS
Works by Manfred Krifka
— bibliography at

PhilPapers PhilPapers is an interactive academic database of journal articles in philosophy. It is maintained by the Centre for Digital Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, and as of 2022, it has "394,867 registered users, including the majorit ...

Dinner at Amadeus after the conference
— photo of Krifka after the fourth

Formal Semantics in Moscow Formal Semantics in Moscow (FSiM) is an annual academic conference devoted to the formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. Igor Yanovich, email to LINGUIST List, calling for papers, 20 January 2008. See also * Lomonosov Moscow State ...

Conference (FSiM 4, 2008)

Barbara Partee Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore ...

and uploaded at Flickr]
Theoretical Linguistics
— official website of the journal Linguists from Germany Living people 1956 births {{germany-linguist-stub