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Two scholars whose work was important for typology in Europe have
recently passed away.<br>
<br>
<b>Gilbert Lazard</b> (1920-2018.09.06) began his career as an
Iranicist but became interested in syntactic typology in the 1970s
and published the landmark book "Actancy" in 1997 (in French:
"L'actance", 1994). He continued to work on questions of general
linguistics and language comparison for many years after retiring
from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), and gave a
plenary talk at ALT in Paris in 2007 (at the age of 87). He inspired
many French-speaking linguists over the decades, and his ideas were
important for the development of the widely recognized notion of
comparative concepts for typology. In 2012/2016, there was a lively
exchange between Lazard and Givón in the journal "Studies in
Language" ("The case for pure linguistics" vs. "Beyond
structuralism").<br>
<br>
<b>Hansjakob Seiler</b> (1920-2018.08.13) was originally an
Indo-Europeanist, but got interested in North American languages in
the mid-1950s and began to work seriously on universals and typology
around 1970. He was professor at the University of Cologne between
1959 and 1986 (where I overlapped with him for one semester). Among
his students and associates were Christian Lehmann, Ulrike Mosel,
and Jürgen Broschart. For many years, he was the head of a project
on universals research with external funding, called UNITYP (with
its own Wikipedia page: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNITYP">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNITYP</a>).
Seiler's writings were not so influential, but, for example, his
work on relative clauses in the 1960s and on possessive
constructions in the 1980s were important for some subsequent
researchers. Like Lazard, he was active for long after his
retirement and published his last book in 2015.<br>
<br>
Lazard:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Lazard">https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Lazard</a><br>
<br>
Seiler:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansjakob_Seiler">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansjakob_Seiler</a><br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig
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