26.3687, All: Obituary: Wulf Oesterreicher (1942-2015)

Wed Aug 19 16:31:31 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3687. Wed Aug 19 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3687, All: Obituary: Wulf Oesterreicher (1942-2015)

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Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 12:31:11
From: Ulrich DETGES [detges at romanistik.uni-muenchen.de]
Subject: Obituary: Wulf Oesterreicher (1942-2015)

Wulf Oesterreicher, professor of Romance linguistics at the University of Munich, died unexpectedly on 7 August 2015, at the age of 72. Recently, the renowned Spanish linguist Rafael Cano Aguilar called him „one of the greatest scholars of contemporary Romance Linguistics“.

Wulf Oesterreicher was born in Moravia in 1942, but grew up in the Swabian town of Esslingen near Stuttgart. He studied German and Romance philology and philosophy at the University of Tübingen. During this period, he first met Eugenio Coseriu, who then was his academic teacher and who had a lasting intellectual impact on him. In fact, Wulf regarded his own academic oeuvre as a creative and critical but conclusive continuation of Coseriu’s works. Later, Wulf became Hans-Martin Gauger’s assistant at the University of Freiburg. In 1979 he published his PhD thesis on Sprachtheorie und Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft [Linguistic theory and theory of linguistics] (Heidelberg: Winter). The Freiburg period marked the beginning of his life-long friendship with Brigitte Schlieben-Lange and with Peter Koch, both of whom were to become, like Wulf, leading figures in Romance linguistics. A turning point in Wulf’s academic career was his participation in the Freiburg Sonderforschungsbereich
  on orality and literacy. Soon, Wulf Oesterreicher and Peter Koch became the leading theorists of this prestigious enterprise. In particular, they developed the theoretical concepts of immediacy (“Nähespräche”) and distance (“Distanzsprache”) which they conceived of as opposed modes of discourse-production and which they distinguished from speaking and writing as material codes. The impact of their theory, which was first published in a jointly authored article in Romanistisches Jahrbuch in 1985, was massive, because it allowed a fresh look on many traditional problems of Romance linguistics. Wulf and Peter had laid the groundwork for entirely new views on the properties of spoken language, on textual genre („discourse traditions“), on language history and on historical linguistics, most notably on the transition from Latin to Romance and on the histories of the Romance Languages. Their monograph Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch [
 Spoken Language in the Romania: French, Italian, Spanish] - which was first published in 1990 and has been re-edited in a revised Spanish translation (2007) and an updated German version (2011) – arguably constitutes the most influential single piece of academic work published in Romance linguistics in Germany since the 1990. All in all, Wulf edited or co-edited about twenty volumes, and published more than a hundred and twenty articles. In 1991, Wulf was awarded a professorship at the University of Munich. After having declined offers from several other universities, he was granted the chair of Romance Linguistics at Munich in 1994. He served as Dean of the Faculty for Linguistics and Literature (1997–1999), and Director of the Department (1998–2000), and acted as president of the Deutscher Romanistenverband (German Society of Romance studies, 1997–2001) and reviewer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, 1997–2010) and the German Science Foundation (DFG, 2004–
 2011). Subsequently, he was appointed member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (2003), corresponding member of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua (2005) and the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (2010), and he was elected conseiller for the Société de linguistique Romane (2010). During his Munich period, Wulf directed several large-scale research programs concerning the evolution of Spanish in Latin America and to the kingdom of Naples (dominated by Spain). Wulf was invited as a guest professor to universities in Budapest, Sevilla and Padova within Europe, and to Guadalajara (Mexico), Caracas (Venezuela), Lima (Peru), Curitiba, São Paulo, Campinas (Brazil), San Miguel de Tucumán, Córdoba, Mendoza and Buenos Aires (Argentina).

To those who knew him personally, Wulf will always be remembered for his personal charisma, his robust vitality and his indestructible joie de vivre. Wulf loved his work. He liked teaching, he enjoyed socializing with colleagues and students, and his favorite place in life was in the middle of a good, controversial debate. Above all, he had the capacity to make people feel at home - students as well as junior colleagues. About fifty doctoral theses supervised by him bear witness of his skills - professional as well as personal - as an academic teacher. Wulf died on 7 August following a short but fatal illness.

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

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