Peter Koch (Romanist)

Peter Koch (born March 1, 1951 in Hanover ; † July 7, 2014 in Tübingen ) was a German linguist, Romanist , Frenchist, Italianist and medievalist .

life and work

Koch studied Romance Philology at the University of Göttingen , the University of Poitiers and the University of Freiburg and graduated in 1975 with the first state examination for teaching at grammar school . He received his doctorate in 1979 at the University of Freiburg under Hans-Martin Gauger with the thesis Verb - Valenz - Jetzt. On sentence semantics and valence of French verbs using the example of disposal verbs (Heidelberg 1981) and was his assistant until 1986.

He completed his habilitation in 1987 with the text Distance in Dictamen. On the written form and pragmatics of medieval letter and speech models in Italy , he held a professorship previously represented by him at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 1988 to 1990 and was professor at the Free University of Berlin from 1990 to 1996 (with Andreas Blank as assistant). From 1996 until his death, Koch taught Romance linguistics at the University of Tübingen (as the successor to Hans Helmut Christmann ) . Visiting professorships took him to Naples, Paris and Lyon.

From 1985 he and his friend Wulf Oesterreicher developed a theory of "conceptual" orality and written form , which can be traced back to a pragmatic continuum between the "language of proximity" and the "language of distance".

Koch had part 9: Lexique et sémantique lexicale in the project of a Grande grammaire historique du français (GGHF) initiated by Christiane Marchello-Nizia and decided in 2007 . La formation des mots du lexique, la structuration du lexique, lexique et grammaire adopted.

From 2001 to 2004, Koch was chairman of the German Association of Italianists. He was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (since 2007) and co-editor of the magazine Romanistisches Jahrbuch (since 2012).

Other works

• (with Wulf Oesterreicher ) Spoken language in Romania. French. Italian. Spanish , Tübingen 1990; 2nd extended edition, Berlin 2011 (Spanish: Lengua hablada en la Romania: español, francés, italiano , Madrid 2007)
• (Ed. With Thomas Krefeld ) Connexiones Romanicae. Dependence and valence in Romance languages , Tübingen 1991
• (Ed. With Sybille Krämer) Scripture, media, cognition. On the exteriority of the mind , Tübingen 1997, 2009
• (Ed. With Andreas Blank) Historical semantics and cognition , Berlin 1999
• (Ed. With Andreas Blank) Cognitive Romance Onomasiology and Semasiology , Tübingen 2003
• (Ed. With Peter Blumenthal ) Valence. Perspectives allemandes , Caen 2003

literature

• Frame of speech. Contributions to valence theory, variety linguistics, creole studies, cognitive and historical semantics. Peter Koch on his 60th birthday , ed. by Sarah Dessì Schmid , Ulrich Detges , Paul Gévaudan , Wiltrud Mihatsch and Richard Waltereit , Tübingen 2011
• Paul Gévaudan: Peter Koch (1.3.1951–7.7.2014). In: PhiN. Philologie im Netz 69/2014 , pp. 88–92
• Wiltrud Mihatsch: Peter Koch (1951–2014) , in: Journal for French Language and Literature, Vol. 124, H. 3 (2014), pp. 225-228.

Web links

• http://www.romanistik.uni-tuebingen.de/peter-koch.html (Vita, list of publications, obituaries)
• http://www.romanistik.de/aktuelles/329 (obituary by Johannes Kabatek )
• http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2914.html (obituary, English, by Richard Waltereit)

Footnotes and individual references

1. ^ Johannes Kabatek, obituary for Peter Koch, Romanistik.de [1] (accessed on August 26, 2015)
2. ↑ Hans-Martin Gauger : The language of proximity. On the death of the Romanist Wulf Oesterreicher. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 10, 2015, p. 12.