27.473, All: Obituary: Heinz Vater (1932-2015)

Mon Jan 25 15:33:54 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-473. Mon Jan 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.473, All: Obituary: Heinz Vater (1932-2015)

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Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 10:33:42
From: Winfried Boeder [winfried.boeder at uni-oldenburg.de]
Subject: Obituary: Heinz Vater (1932-2015)

Heinz Vater, professor emeritus of German linguistics at the University of
Cologne, an excellent linguist, a great teacher, and a dear friend, died in
Berlin on June 18, 2015 after complications from a heart surgery.

Heinz Vater was born in Frankfurt (Oder) on July 29th, 1932. His mother was
Jewish, but thanks to his father’s courage and circumspection, his family
survived, hiding in a secret annex and living in constant fear of imminent
deportation; his grandmother was murdered in Auschwitz. He could only attend a
special school for “half-Jews” in Berlin until 1942 and was largely deprived
of books and the pleasure of listening to music and playing an instrument,
which he enjoyed doing so much throughout his life. The 23th of April 1945
finally brought the long hoped-for liberation. 
After his studies at Humboldt University in East Berlin, Wolfgang Steinitz
offered him a position as an assistant at the Research Institute of Structural
Grammar (Arbeitsstelle für Strukturelle Grammatik), a section of the German
Academy of Sciences at Berlin (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin). When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he escaped to Western
Germany. He even succeeded in rescuing the manuscript of his dissertation when
climbing over the wall. In 1962, he obtained his PhD at Hamburg University
with a dissertation on the system of articles in present-day German ("Das
System der Artikelformen in gegenwärtigen Deutsch," 1963, 2nd edition 1979).
After three years of work at the Institute of the Society for the German
Language at Lüneburg, he became a research assistant to professor Hans
Hartmann at the Institute of General and Comparative Linguistics at Hamburg
University. In 1969, he qualified as a university lecturer with a monograph on
Danish complement clauses - in the framework of “generative dependency
grammar” - which was published in 1973. In the same year he was appointed as
an associate professor at the Germanic Department of Indiana University at
Bloomington for three years, a period which he always remembered as
stimulating and enjoyable.
In 1972, Heinz Vater was offered a full professorship at the University of
Cologne and became the first professor of linguistics at its Department of
German, where he stayed until his retirement in 1997. He was an unusually
devoted and successful teacher. He taught a large number of students, who
appreciated his lucid and vivid style of presentation, his broad knowledge,
his friendly helpfulness, and his careful assistance and guidance. He sparked
interest in linguistics and encouraged a great many students to write their
dissertation on linguistic topics. A considerable number of his former
students have become academics and teach at universities in Germany and
abroad. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, his colleagues and friends
honoured him with a festschrift comprising 29 contributions on his favourite
topics: German phonology and morphology, various aspects of noun phrases,
modality, the temporal system, valency and text linguistics. Throughout his
academic life, he constantly published articles and books. Many of his
introductory monographs were the outcome of his carefully prepared seminars on
transformational grammar, on the linguistic concepts of space and time, and on
text linguistics. His introduction to linguistics, first published in 1994,
appeared in several editions. In addition, he edited volumes on modality and
related problems. His extraordinary knowledge of Danish, Polish, French and
other languages also allowed him to work on contrastive linguistics.

Heinz Vater played a decisive role in the renewal and strengthening of German
linguistics as an academic discipline. His dissertation was one of the first
linguistic studies using a strictly structuralist approach in Western Germany.
As early as in 1966, he co-initiated the first linguistic colloquium, which
continues to be regularly held at different places in Germany and abroad. He
was one of the founding members of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), whose president he was between 1986 and
1988. For many decades, he was the editor of the Cologne Linguistic Studies of
German (Kölner Linguistische Arbeiten zur Germanistik) and a co-editor of
three important series of linguistic monographs: "Studien zur Deutschen
Grammatik" (1972-1999), "Fokus. Linguistisch-philologische Studien"
(1980-2000), and "Linguistische Arbeiten" (1972-2002). 

Heinz Vater was known world-wide and received invitations for guest lectures
from many universities: He gave lectures in the United States, Brazil, and
several European countries: France, Italy, Great Britain, Spain, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia and the Netherlands. As an emeritus, he gave
lectures and series of seminars in Berlin, Lithuania, and Hungary, where he
received a doctor honoris causa from the University of Szeged (2009). He was
invited to teach and give lectures at the Polish universities of Lublin,
Poznań, Wrocław, Szczecin, Rzeszów, Warsaw, Kraków, Bydgoszcz, and Gdańsk from
1976 to 2015, a few months before his death. He regularly participated in the
meetings of his Polish colleagues, who honoured him with an award conferred in
2013.

His former friends, colleagues and students will never forget Heinz Vater. He
will be remembered for his amiable personality, his sense of humour, his
overwhelming friendliness, loyalty and helpfulness, and his true passion for
linguistics.

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

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