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 ...

, 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 ...

''. 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-W� ...

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, linguistics and comput ...

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, 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, in particular mass nouns 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, questions and speech acts.

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
Dinner at Amadeus after the conference
— photo of Krifka after the fourth Formal Semantics in Moscow 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