Manfred Krifka

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, and professor of general linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was editor of the academic journal Linguistics and Philosophy from 1999 to 2023 and is editor of Theoretical Linguistics

Manfred Krifka
Krifka in 2023
Born	(1956-04-26) 26 April 1956 Dachau, Bavaria, Germany
Nationality	German
Education	Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Occupation	Linguist
Spouse	Zuzana Krifka Dobes (died 2022)
Children	2 daughters, Lydia and Theresa

Career and education

Krifka graduated from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1986 in Theoretical Linguistics, Philosophy and Theory of Science, and Psycholinguistics. He consequently held positions at the University of Tübingen 1986 - 1989, at the University of Texas at Austin 1990-2000, and at Humboldt University of Berlin 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, pragmatics, language typology and Melanesian languages, especially languages of Ambrym, in particular Daakie, or Port Vato language, and the Creole language Bislama. He has done substantial works on the meaning of nouns, in particular mass nouns and count nouns, on grammatical aspect, generic sentences, polarity items and negation, quantification and vagueness, information structure, anaphora, discourse, questions, response particles and speech acts.

Awards and distinctions

Krifka was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 1995-1996 and of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies 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 in 2023 and the Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize of the German Society of Linguistics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) in 2024.

Bibliography

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

External links

• [1] - official staff page at ZAS with publications and presentations
• 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) [taken by Barbara Partee and uploaded at Flickr]
• Theoretical Linguistics — official website of the journal