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

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

, and professor of general linguistics at the

Humboldt University of Berlin The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humbol ...

. He was editor of the academic journal ''

Linguistics and Philosophy ''Linguistics and Philosophy'' is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes work addressing meaning and structure in natural language. It is one of four top journals in formal semantics, alongside Natural Language Semantics, the Journal of Semanti ...

'' from 1999 to 2023 and is editor of ''

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

'' since 2001. 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, LMU or LMU Munich; ) is a public university, public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke ...

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 (; ), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The University of Tübingen is one of eleven German Excellenc ...

1986 - 1989, at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

1990-2000, and at

2000 - 2022. Starting in 2001 until November 2022, he has been the director of the Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Centre for General Linguistics), since 2017 Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS); since 2023 he is Senior Fellow at ZAS.

Work

Krifka's main areas of research are linguistic

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

pragmatics In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship ...

, language typology 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 ...

, in particular Daakie, or Port Vato language, and the Creole language

Bislama Bislama ( ; ; also known by its earlier French name, ) is an English-based creole language. It is the national language of Vanuatu, and one of the three official languages of the country, the other ones being English and French. Bislama is the ...

. He has done substantial works on the meaning of

nouns In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example n ...

, 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 a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference t ...

, generic sentences, polarity items and

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation (mathematics), operation that takes a Proposition (mathematics), proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P, P^\prime or \over ...

, quantification and

vagueness In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word " prime" ...

information structure In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is Formal semantics (natural language), formally packaged within a Sentence (linguistics), sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Informati ...

, anaphora, discourse,

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 i ...

, response particles and

speech acts Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...

Awards and distinctions

Krifka was a Fellow at the

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research institution at Stanford University designed to advance the frontiers of knowledge about human behavior and society, and contribute to the resoluti ...

1995-1996 and of the

Israel Institute for Advanced Studies The Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (; IIAS, or IAS in Israel) is a research institute in Jerusalem, devoted to academic research in physics, mathematics, the life sciences, economics, and comparative religion. It is a self-governing body, ...

in 1997. He received the Meyer-Struckmann Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences for his work on language and cognition in 2021, a Honorary Membership of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

in 2023 and the Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize of the German Society of Linguistics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) in 2024.

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

- official staff page at ZAS with publications and presentations
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 it has "394,867 registered users, including the majority of profes ...

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). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics. Biography Bo ...

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