Konrad Körner (linguist)

Ernst Frideryk Konrad Körner (born February 5, 1939 in Mlewiec near Toruń ), widely known in the professional world as EFK or EFK Koerner , is a German linguist and professor of the history of linguistics.

Childhood, adolescence and studies

Konrad, with his full name Ernst Frideryk Konrad Körner, was born in his family's manor in the village of Mlewiec , today in Gmina Kowalewo Pomorskie , near Toruń in Poland . It belonged to 1920 the province of West Prussia and was called in the former Kingdom of Prussia court life . Konrad is the second son of the agrarian and doctor of law Johann Jakob Friedrich Körner and his wife Annelise, née Koerner, who came from a distant branch of the Berlin family. Konrad has two famous ancestors, one, Theodor Körner , was Lord Mayor of Thorn from 1842 to 1871, and the other, Ernst Carl Eugen Koerner, was a successful landscape painter. As residents of German descent, the family had to leave their homeland in Poland after the Second World War and moved to West Germany . Körner attended grammar school in Krefeld , where he graduated from high school in 1960. After graduating from school, he was drafted into the armed forces for two years. In 1962 he began to study German, English, art history, pedagogy and philosophy at the University of Göttingen with the intention of later pursuing a career as a high school or university teacher. After three semesters he moved to the Free University in West Berlin . From 1965 to 1966 he spent two semesters abroad at the University of Edinburgh , where he studied English literature and linguistics with John Lyons . In the summer of 1965 he returned to Berlin to take the Philosophicum . He then worked for a school year as a German and English teacher in France at the Collège Notre-Dame in Valenciennes .

To complete the second state examination, Körner returned to Germany in 1966. During the following four semesters at the University of Gießen he switched to linguistics . The topic of his master's thesis was the development and use of the possible forms in the German language. Although he had referred to some of Ferdinand de Saussure's findings in his master's thesis , it took more than a year before he studied Saussure's work Cours de linguistique générale as a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver . For his doctorate on the history and development of Saussure's theory, he had recruited the Canadian linguist GL Bursill-Hall as his doctoral supervisor. Körner began with a literature collection on the background, development and current significance of Saussure's theory of language , which was released for publication a year later, when he was still writing his dissertation. He defended his doctoral thesis in 1971 at Dell Hymes . It was published 15 months later in Germany and then translated into Spanish, Japanese and Hungarian.

Career as a scientist and editor in the field of linguistics

Immediately after defending his doctoral thesis, Winfred P. Lehmann brought Körner to Austin at the University of Texas as a research assistant . From 1972 he worked for a year in Thomas A. Sebeok's research institute at Indiana University in Bloomington . At this time he began planning a journal devoted to the history of linguistics and the publication of related monographs. To this end, he met John L. Benjamin in Amsterdam in August 1972 . With him he agreed to publish the Historiographia Linguistica , the first journal on the history of linguistics , and the two book series Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics and Classics in Psycholinguistics . The book series should include linguistic texts from the 19th and 20th centuries with introductions and comments by modern linguists and selected studies in the History of the Language Sciences (SiHoLS). So far 116 books of the SiHoLS series have been published. In September 1973, Körner came to Germany to do his habilitation at the University of Regensburg , where he worked at the Department of Linguistics. During this activity he was able to continue his research and the development of the journal and the book series. In addition to the SiHoLS series , he began to publish a series of books on current linguistic publications (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (CILT)). In the CILT series , 319 books were published up to September 2011.

Körner was appointed professor and director of the Linguistics Documentation Center at the University of Ottawa in 1976 . There he taught linguistics of the 20th century from Sapir to Chomsky and the history of linguistics . In 1980 he was visiting professor of the history of linguistics at the LSA Linguistic Institute in Albuquerque , New Mexico.

In 1978, Körner organized the first International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS) in Ottawa . Since then there have been eleven further conferences every three years: Lille (1981), Princeton (1984), Trier (1987), Galway (1990), Washington, DC (1993), Oxford (1996), Paris (1999), São Paulo / Campinas (2002), Urbana-Champaign (2005), Potsdam (2008), and St Petersburg (2011). In addition, Körner co-founded the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas (HSS) in Oxford in the spring of 1984 and, during the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in San Francisco in December 1987, founder of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS). Together with the ethnographer William Cowan from Carleton University and Michael K. Foster from the National Museum of Man (now: The Canadian Museum of Civilization), Körner participated in the organization of the international Edward Sapir Centenary Conference , which took place in October 1984 in Ottawa, Victoria Memorial Museum took place. Also in 1984 he founded Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics , first published by Georg Olms and later by John Benjamin. Diachronica offers a forum for the presentation and discussion of all aspects of language change in all languages ​​worldwide. Körner was editor of Diachronica until December 2001 and then became a consultant to the editors. Körner was the editor of the History of Linguistics of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics , published by RE Asher (Oxford & New York: Pergamon Press, 1994). In 2000 he worked as a consultant on the history of linguistics for the Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago). He was chief editor of the three volume History of the Language Sciences , published by DeGruyter from 2000 to 2006. In 2007, Körner's three-volume edition Edward Sapir: Critical assessments of leading linguists , published by Routledge, was published.

With the establishment of Historiographia Linguistica , the edition of various book series and the organization of the first congress History of the Language Sciences , Körner can more or less be described as the academic founder of the academic field of history of linguistics .

honors and awards

• October 1994 - Honorary Doctorate from Sofia University .
• February 1995 - Medal of Honor from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
• May 1997 - Member of the Royal Society of Canada .
• February 1998 - Member of the Royal Society of Arts , London.
• 2001 to 2002 - Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar near Leiden.
• 2002 to 2003 - Konrad Adenauer Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Society with lectures at the University of Cologne and at the Center for General Linguistics in Berlin.
• April 2004 - Honorary Doctorate from the University of St. Petersburg .
• September 2016 - Honorary doctorate from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
• April 2018 - Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in recognition of his significant contributions to the History of Linguistics .

Konrad Körner held the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa from 1988 until his retirement in 2001. He then moved to Berlin, where he continues to work as a scientist and editor, primarily in the field of the history of linguistics .

bibliography

The first editions of Konrad Körner's books and specialist articles appeared - as listed below - predominantly in English, and he publishes under the name EFK Koerner . In the professional world he is therefore mainly known as EFK Koerner . Because he was born in Poland, Anglo-American and English articles often refer to him as a linguist of Polish origin.

Monographs by EFK Koerner

• Bibliographia Saussureana 1870-1970: An annotated, classified bibliography on the background, development, and actual relevance of Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of language (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1972).
• Contribution au débat post-saussurien sur le signe linguistique: Introduction générale et bibliographie annotée (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1972).
• Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of His Linguistic Thought in Western Studies of Language. A contribution to the history and theory of linguistics (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn [Oxford & Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press], 1973). - This book has been translated into Hungarian (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1982); Japanese (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1982), and Spanish (Madrid: Gredos, 1982).
• The Importance of Techmer's “International Journal of General Linguistics” in the Development of General Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1973).
• Western Histories of Linguistics, 1822-1976: An annotated, chronological bibliography (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1978).
• Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: Selected essays. Foreword by RH Robins (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1978).
• Linguistics and evolution theory (Three essays by August Schleicher , Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bleek ). Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamin Publishing Company (1983).
• Noam Chomsky: A personal bibliography, 1951-1986 (Together with Matsuji Tajima as associate compiler) (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1986).
• Saussurean Studies / Études saussuriennes . Avant-propos de Rudolf Engler (Genève: Éditions Slatkine, 1988).
• Practicing Linguistic Historiography: Selected essays (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989).
• Professing Linguistic Historiography (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995).
• Linguistic Historiography: Projects & prospects (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999).
• Toward a History of American Linguistics (London & New York: Routledge, 2002).
• Essays in the History of Linguistics (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004).
• Jezikoslovna historigrafija: Metodologija i praksa. Transl. by Milica Lukšić , ed. by Zvonko Pandžić (Zagreb: Tusculanae Editiones, 2007).
• Universal Index of Biographical Names in the Language Sciences (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008).
• Quatro décadas de historiografia linguista: estudes selecionados. (Author: EFK Koerner, Ed .: Rolf Kemmler ; Centro de Estudos em Letras, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro 2014) ISBN 9789897041877 .

Festschriften and similar publications in honor of EFK Koerner

• EFK Koerner Bibliography , ed. By William Cowan & Michael K. Foster (Bloomington, Ind .: Eurolingua, 1989).
• Professing Koernerian Linguistics , by Paul Sidwell & Neile A. Kirk (Melbourne: Association for the History of Language, 1998).
• EFK Koerner: A biobibliography , ed. By Pierre Swiggers (Leuven: Peeters for Center International de Dialectologie Générale, 1999).
• The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the transition from historical-comparative to structural linguistics, in honor of EFK Koerner . Ed. by Sheila Embleton , John E. Joseph and Hans-Josef Niederehe . Vol. I: Historiographical Perspectives; vol. II: Methodological Perspectives and Applications (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999).
• Chomskyan (R) evolutions , ed. By Douglas A. Kibbee (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ HOW IT HAS BEEN: OR, NOTES CONCERNING THE PRE-HISTORY OF THE HENRY SWEET SOCIETY ( English , PDF) Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas. Retrieved August 20, 2019.