Walter Bisang

Walter Bisang

Walter Bisang (born February 2, 1959 in Zurich ) is a Swiss linguist living and working in Germany who specializes in theoretical linguistics and language typology .

Life

After graduating from high school , he studied general linguistics as the main subject and Chinese and Georgian as the minor subjects at the University of Zurich from 1978 to 1986 . In 1986/1987 he continued his studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he studied Thai , Khmer and linguistics.

From 1987 to 1992 he was an assistant at the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Zurich. His teacher was Meinrad Scheller (1921–1991), who in turn was a student of Manu Leumann . In 1990 Bisang received his doctorate in general linguistics in Zurich with a comparative thesis on East and Southeast Asian languages. In 1992 he was appointed to the University of Mainz and has been teaching there since then as a professor for general and comparative linguistics, the latter being defined in terms of the language typology .

In 1998 he organized the International Summer School on the subject of " Language Typology " at the University of Mainz on behalf of the German Society for Linguistics . In 2016 he was elected to the Academia Europaea .

research

In addition to theoretical linguistics , his main interest is language typology . Bisang was a member of the Eurotyp project funded by the European Science Foundation from 1992 to 1995 . His contribution with “The view from the far East” appeared in Volume 3 in 1998 on “Adverbial constructions in the languages ​​of Europe”.

Bisang was visiting professor at the Research Center for Linguistic Typology at LaTrobe University in Melbourne in June / July 2000 , in March / April 2001 at the Université Paris VII (Chinese), in October / November. 2003 at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok , in June / July 2006 at the Obafemi / Awolowo University in Ile-Ife in Nigeria and in May 2008 in Paris at the Center de recherches linguistiques sur l'asie orientale (CNRS, École des hautes études et sciences sociales ).

From 1999 to 2008 Bisang was the spokesman for the special research area “Cultural and Linguistic Contacts: Processes of Change in the Historical Tensions of Northeast Africa / West Asia” (Mainz), which is funded by the German Research Foundation . The project combined ancient, ethnological and linguistic disciplines under the question of the effects of contact situations and their socio-cultural conditions on change processes in areas such as politics (structures of rule, image of rulers), religion , social structures , forms of settlement , art and language .

Bisang is co-editor of the “Trends in Linguistics” series published by Mouton de Gruyter . He is also the editor of two specialist journals , "Asian Linguistics" and the "Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft". Furthermore, he has been a member of the DFG Review Board 104 since 2004 and is with two colleagues in the areas of typology, non-European languages, older language levels and historical linguistics . After all, he has two roles in the European Science Foundation .

In linguistic theory , his focus is on the topics of language typology and linguistic universals , formal vs. Functional linguistics, linguistic complexity and their assessment in different theoretical directions, language contact and its structural consequences as well as area typology . Concerning concrete grammatical phenomena , he is concerned with verb serialization , sentence linking , finiteness ; the numerical classifiers ; the part of speech problem and finally the argument structure . Languages ​​of particular interest to Bisang are the languages ​​of East and Southeast Asia, then the languages ​​of the Caucasus (especially Georgian ), Austronesian (Bahasa Indonesia, Jabêm) and, last but not least, Yoruba (which he is researching together with Remi Sonaiya). Beyond linguistics, it is the consequences of contact situations for cultures and languages, actors and their motivations that find his interest, and finally social networks (on a micro and a macro level).

Publications

• The verb in Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer. Comparative grammar in the context of verb serialization, grammaticalization and attractor positions . Tübingen: Gunter Narr (Language Universals Series; 7) 1992.
• “Areal typology and grammaticalization: Processes of grammaticalization based on nouns and verbs in East and mainland South East Asian languages”, in: Studies in Language , 20.3, 519-597. 1996
• “The view from the far East. Comments on seven thematic areas ”. In: Van der Auwera, Johan with Dónall P. Ó Baoill. (Ed.). Adverbial constructions in the languages ​​of Europe . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 641-812. 1998
• . “Dialectology and typology - an integrative perspective”, in: Kortmann, Bernd (Ed.). Dialectology meets typology. Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective , 11-45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2004.
• “Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning: The case of tense-aspect-modality in East and mainland Southeast Asia”, in: Bisang, Walter, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann , Björn Wiemer (eds.), What makes grammaticalization? - A look from its fringes and its components , 109-138. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2004.
• “Culture and language from the perspective of contact”, in: Bisang, Walter, Thomas Bierschenk, Detlef Kreikenbom and Ursula Verhoeven (eds.), Culture, Language, Contact , 1-52. Würzburg: Ergon 2004.
• “Widening the perspective: Argumenthood and syntax in Chinese, Japanese and Tagalog”, in: Hole, Daniel, Opinion, André & Abraham, Werner (Eds.), Datives and other cases. Between argument structure and event structure , 331-381. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamin 2006.
• “Precategoriality and syntax-based parts of speech - the case of Late Archaic Chinese”, in: Studies in Language 32, 568-589 2008.
• “On the evolution of complexity - sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia”, in: Sampson, Geoffrey, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (Eds.), Language complexity as an evolving variable , 34-49. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Bisang in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bisang's homepage of the University of Mainz