Christian Lehmann (Linguist)

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Christian Lehmann (born November 8, 1948 in Rittmarshausen ) is a German linguist. Until his retirement in 2014, he was Professor of General and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Erfurt .

resume

Christian Lehmann was born in Rittmarshausen in the district of Göttingen. After attending school, he studied general and comparative linguistics as well as classical philology at the Universities of Göttingen and Cologne from 1967 to 1972 . After completing his master's degree in 1972 and a doctorate shortly thereafter with a thesis on Latin conditional clauses at Hansjakob Seiler in Cologne, he worked on a DFG project from 1973 to 1981 and held a professorship for linguistics at the (partly at the same time) from 1975 to 1977 University of Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre , Brazil . In 1980 Lehmann completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne with a typological study on relative clauses that received much attention , which was published in 1984 under the title Der Relativsatz. Typology of its structures - theory of its functions - compendium of its grammar was published.

After Lehmann had received a Heisenberg grant from 1981 to 1984 , he was appointed professor of linguistics at Bielefeld University in 1984 . Despite another call to Kiel , which he refused, Lehmann stayed there until 1999, when he accepted a call to the University of Erfurt as Professor of General and Comparative Linguistics .

On his 60th birthday on November 8, 2008, a commemorative publication entitled Studies on grammaticalization was published . In 2009, with a slight delay, another commemorative publication with the title Form and Function in Language Research followed , in which Christian Lehmann's contribution in the field of linguistics was recognized as follows:

“Christian Lehmann is one of the leading linguists of our times and was enormously influential in many areas of linguistic research, in particular in linguistic typology and language theory. His ideas on syntactic categories and relations, agreement, relative clauses, clause linkage, lexical typology, predicate classes, adpositions, possession, semantic roles, and many other issues more all left their traces in the nineteen articles of this volume. "

- Helmbrecht, Nishina, Shin, Skopeteas, Verhoeven : 2009, p. 1

Research priorities

Awards and memberships

Lehmann received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 1983 . Since 1989 Lehmann has been a full and later a corresponding member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences , since 2001 a full member of the humanities class of the Academy of Non-profit Sciences in Erfurt and since 2010 of the Academia Europaea .

Research projects

Lehmann researches different languages ​​and their structure. For example, he dealt with the Central American Indian language Yucatec , to which the project Typology of Yucatec , which was carried out from 1995 to 2002, and the research project La lengua maya de Yucatán , which began in 2007, apply. Related to this is the more general Lenguas indígenas de la Baja Centroamérica program , which Lehmann is carrying out together with Juan Diego Quesada from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica in Heredia . Since 2012 he has been dealing with the description and documentation of the Kanakanavu language (an indigenous language spoken in Costa Rica).

Lehmann uses the UNITYP approach , which starts out from cognitive structures or dimensions (e.g. possession , apprehension ) when describing linguistic structures (e.g. genitive constructions) . This cognitive-communicative approach has the advantage over structural approaches that the abundance of morphosyntactic constructions is taken into account and not too narrow morphosyntactic definitions for a certain type of construction exclude certain languages ​​that have it in a completely different form. This can be seen well in the first part of a congress contribution on Latin causativization in typological perspective . There Lehmann developed the term causativization from the cognitive structure of participation, before he developed the strategies of causativization , i.e. H. the morphosyntactic forms, discussed. Traditional language comparisons would proceed in reverse and begin with the morphosyntactic surface, but then run the risk of not capturing many completely different realizations of the cognitive type. As part of the Cologne project, Lehmann worked on Determination (akup, 17) and on Rection and syntactic (n) relations (akup, 45) and theoretically u. a. Thoughts on grammaticalization (akup, 48) expressed. He also applies this typological approach to other areas such as Latin linguistics .

By far the most influential works by Lehmann are those on grammaticalization, both the book (first as gray literature 1982, latest edition online 2002) and its condensation in the article from 1985. In particular the six parameters with which the relative degree of grammaticalization of Constructs can be determined are repeatedly used in analyzes.

Fonts

  • Latin with abstract structures (=  Structura . Band 7 ). W. Fink, Munich 1973.
  • Latin preverbs and cases . Proceedings of the 1st International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics. In: Latin linguistics and linguistic theory . J. Benjamin, Amsterdam / Philadelphia 1983, pp. 145-161 (English).
  • The relative clause. Typology of its structures - Theory of its functions - Compendium of its grammar (=  Language Universals Series . Volume 3 ). Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1984, ISBN 3-87808-982-1 (also: University of Cologne, habilitation thesis, 1979).
  • Grammaticalization. Synchronic variation and diachronic change . In: Lingua e styles . tape 20 , 1985, pp. 303-318 (English).
  • Towards a typology of clause linkage . In: J. Haiman, SA Thompson (Ed.): Clause combining in grammar and discourse . J. Benjamin, Amsterdam / Philadelphia 1988, p. 181-225 (English).
  • Latin valency in typological perspective . In: AM Bolkestein u. a. (Ed.): Theory and description in Latin linguistics. Selected papers from the XIth Colloquium on Latin linguistics . Amsterdam 2002, p. 183-203 (English).
  • Thoughts on grammaticalization (=  working papers of the Seminar for Linguistics at the University of Erfurt . Volume 9 ). 2nd Edition. Seminar for Linguistics at the University, Erfurt 2002 (English, christianlehmann.eu [PDF]).

literature

  • Johannes Helmbrecht, Yoko Nishina, Yong-Min Shin, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Stavros Skopeteas (Eds.): Form and Function in Language Research. Papers in Honor of Christian Lehmann . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021612-7 (English).
  • Lehmann, Christian . In: Werner Schuder (Ed.): Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar . Founded by Joseph Kürschner . 22nd edition. Part 2: H-L . KG Saur Verlag, Munich [including] 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-23629-7 , p. 2398 , doi : 10.1515 / 9783110932195 ( degruyter.com - constantly updated restricted access online edition [Article ID: P10487]).
  • Hansjakob Seiler: Cognitive-Conceptual Structure and Linguistic Encoding. Language Universals and Typology in the UNITYP Framework . In: Masayoshi Shibatani, Theodora Bynon (Ed.): Approaches to language typology . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999, ISBN 0-19-823866-5 , pp. 273-325 (English, first edition: 1995).
  • Elisabeth Verhoeven, u. a. (Ed.): Studies on Grammaticalization . Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-020582-4 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lehmann, Christian. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  2. ^ Lehmann, Christian. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  3. ^ Christian Lehmann. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  4. ^ Christian Lehmann: The relative clause. Typology of its structures; Theory of its functions; Compendium of his grammar (=  Language Universals Series . Volume 3 ). Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1984, ISBN 3-87808-982-1 .
  5. ↑ John Haiman: Christian Lehmann, The relative clause: Typology of its structures; Theory of its functions; Compendium of his grammar. (Language Universals Series, 3.) Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984. Pp. Xvi + 437. In: Journal of Linguistics . tape 22 , no. 1 , March 1986, ISSN  1469-7742 , pp. 194-199 , doi : 10.1017 / S002222670001063X (review).
  6. ^ Studies on Grammaticalization. De Gruyter Mouton, accessed on November 18, 2019 .
  7. ^ Johannes Helmbrecht, Yoko Nishina, Yong-Min Shin, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Stavros Skopeteas: Form and Function in Language Research. Papers in Honor of Christian Lehmann . Walter de Gruyter, 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021612-7 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed November 18, 2019]).
  8. ^ Lehmann, Christian. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  9. ^ Research. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  10. ↑ DFG: Leibniz Prize Winners (general overview). Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  11. ^ AWK: Corresponding members. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  12. ^ Academy of Charitable Sciences in Erfurt :: Members. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  13. ^ Research. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  14. ^ Documentation and Description of Kanakanavu Language. Retrieved November 18, 2019 .
  15. ↑ can be downloaded from the homepage as a PDF file
  16. ↑ Robert Mroczynski: grammaticalization and Pragmatikalisierung. To develop the discourse markers where, because and yes in spoken German . BoD - Books on Demand, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8233-6713-0 , pp. 42 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed November 18, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Lehmann, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Rittmarshausen , Göttingen district