Gerhard Nickel

Gerhard Nickel

Gerhard Nickel (born August 15, 1928 in Hedwigstein , Rosenberg district , Upper Silesia ; † July 23, 2015 in Stuttgart ) was a German linguist and English mediaevalist . He was an eminent linguist who was one of the first to teach structural linguistics in Germany and a pioneer in applied linguistics. He was linguistic advisor to the Council of Europe and UNESCO and taught English linguistics at the University of Stuttgart from 1969 until his retirement in 1996.

Career

Born in Upper Silesia , due to the early evacuation of his homeland in the winter of 1944/45, he was called up in early and direct succession to the Reich Labor Service and the Air Force, with subsequent English captivity . Despite the most adverse economic conditions, he fought his way to high school after his release by working in factories and civil engineering.

He then studied English and French at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen and passed his state examination there. Various scholarships allowed him to study and research stays in the USA, England, France and Spain. A Fulbright scholarship enabled him to study at the University of South Carolina (Columbia) with a Master of Arts degree in 1951. Due to the exceptionally high quality of his master’s thesis on The influence of English restoration comedy in early American comedy , that he was made an honorary member of the Alpha Beta Kappa Society .

In 1952 he received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen with a dissertation on the subject of the socio-cultural background of early American comedy . After several years of teaching, he became a British Council Fellow from 1959 to 1960 and conducted research under the direction of Randolph Quirk at the University of Durham in the field of historical and contemporary English syntax. In 1962 he completed his habilitation at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen with a thesis on The Expanded Form in Old English . This work was published in 1966 and is still considered to be one of the standard works on this topic. One year after the venia legendi was granted, he was offered a chair for English linguistics at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. In 1969 he accepted an appointment at the University of Stuttgart and stayed there - despite appointments to the Free University of Berlin, the University of Duisburg and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as well as the American universities of South Carolina and Northern Illinois - until his retirement in 1996 Full Professor of English Linguistics. In 1975 he founded the language center there, which he ran as director for many years.

Gerhard Nickel belonged to the dying species of philologists who represented both medieval studies and modern linguistics. He led both a DFG project on Beowulf research and one of the VW Foundation for Applied Contrastive Linguistics (PAKS). In addition, he was one of the founding fathers, long-time Secretary General and most recently an honorary member of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) and also of the German Society for Applied Linguistics (GAL), of which he was co-founder and long-term honorary president. The London Institute of Linguists honored him with the appointment of an Honorary Fellow and the award of the Diamond Jubilee Medal. Since 1969 he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim.

His activities as a linguistic expert for UNESCO of the Council of Europe, his participation in several specialist journals, etc. a. since 1967 as co-editor of the International Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL), his well over 100 publications have brought him numerous and often repeated invitations to guest professorships, seminars and lectures (including on behalf of the Goethe Institute and the British Council) on all continents. Many of his students hold chairs at home and abroad. Since his retirement, he has regularly followed the call of his Upper Silesian homeland, took on visiting professorships there and helped set up and expand new universities and linguistic projects. In 1986 the University of Poznan awarded him the University Medal and in 1996 the University of Opole awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Publications (selection)

• The Expanded Form in Old English. Neumünster 1966.
• Introduction to Linguistics. Developments, problems, methods. 2nd edition, Berlin 1985.
• Reader on contrastive linguistics. Ed., Frankfurt / Main 1972.
• Beowulf and the smaller monuments of the legendary Waldere and Finnsburg. Ed., 3rd vols., Heidelberg 1976ff.
• Problems of Standardization and Linguistic Variation in Present-Day English. Co-editor, Heidelberg 1986.

Festschriften

• Josef Klegraf / Dietrich Nehls (eds.): Essays on the English Language and Applied Linguistics. On the Occasion of Gerhard Nickel's 60th Birthday. Heidelberg 1988.
• Wolfgang Kühlwein (Ed.): Language as Structure and Language as Process. In Honor of Gerhard Nickel on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday. Trier 1998.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Nickel in the catalog of the German National Library