30.4147, All: Obituary for Knud Lambrecht

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4147. Sat Nov 02 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4147, All: Obituary for Knud Lambrecht

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Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2019 07:46:35
From: Laura Michaelis [laura.michaelis at colorado.edu]
Subject: Obituary for Knud Lambrecht

 
Knud Lambrecht
1939-2019

Knud Lambrecht, Professor Emeritus of French Linguistics at the University of
Texas at Austin, died on September 6, 2019, at the age of 80.

Lambrecht was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1939. At the age of 18, he migrated
to Switzerland, where he earned a Licence ès Lettres (M.A.) in Classical
Philology (Greek, Latin) and Modern Languages (German, French, Spanish) in
1966 at the University of Lausanne. During and after his studies, he taught
Greek, Latin, German language and literature, translation theory, stylistics,
grammar, and rhetoric at the junior high, high school, and university levels.

In the mid-70’s, Lambrecht turned his focus more specifically towards
Linguistics and found his intellectual home at the University of California at
Berkeley. Lambrecht earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 and accepted an
Assistant Professor position in the Department of French and Italian at the
University of Texas at Austin, where he spent the remainder of his academic
career until his retirement in 2010. By then, in addition to expertise in
German, French, Spanish, Greek, and Latin, he had studied Yiddish, Hebrew,
Turkish, Italian, and Lakota.

With characteristic humility and expressive economy, Lambrecht framed his
central research question as: why are there so many ways to say the same thing
in any given language?[1] His answer was that the variant morphological,
prosodic, lexical and syntactic forms used to encode propositional content in
a language reflect language users’ conventionalized solutions to the problem
of fitting sentence structures to communicative contexts. Lambrecht’s seminal
book, Information Structure and Sentence Form (1994), changed the way that
linguists look at the interaction of syntax, discourse, and prosody by
examining it through the lens of construction-based syntax. Key to his
approach was the simple observation that the formal features of an utterance
(e.g., points of prosodic prominence, word order, morphology) encode what
propositional content is to be taken as new (or focal), what propositional
content is to be taken for granted, and what entities are to be treated as
predictable participants of the predication. According to this model, focus
marking is neither iconic nor governed by general algorithms; it is instead
mediated by a set of constructions that instantiate a small universal
inventory of focus articulations. His direct inspiration was the 19th century
Austrian philosopher Anton Marty: Marty’s Doppelurteil (‘double judgment’) was
Lambrecht’s predicate-focus (or, equivalently, topic-comment) articulation,
while Marty’s einfaches Urteil (‘simple judgment’) was Lambrecht’s
sentence-focus (or, equivalently, thetic) articulation. Following Marty,
Lambrecht rejected the Aristotelian view that there is a single human judgment
type, the categorical judgment. Throughout his work, Lambrecht noted that the
thetic type, first brought to the attention of modern linguistics by the work
of Kuroda (1972 et passim), had the most complex and multifarious
instantiations in languages of the world. But, with characteristic acuity,
Lambrecht noted (1994: 139-140) that several of the sentences given by Marty
to illustrate the simple judgment type—in particular Gott ist (‘God
exists’)--are in fact topic-comment, Doppelurteil sentences.

While the universal focus articulations were the cornerstones of Lambrecht’s
cross-linguistic analysis of information-structure distinctions (Lambrecht
2000b), he attended to patterns unique to each language, in the
constructionist tradition. For him, the manner of expression of each focus
articulation in each language was as idiosyncratic as the constructional
inventory of that language. The lesson here is about bricolage: speakers
leverage existing structures of the language to make needed distinctions among
focus articulations. It is thus unsurprising that Lambrecht draws frequently
in his work upon analogies to evolutionary biology, as in the landmark 2001
Linguistics paper (Lambrecht 2001a), in which he provides a typological
framework for the analysis of cleft sentences. The paper begins with an
epigram from Steven Jay Gould, who himself quotes Darwin in noting the many
traits of organisms that are imperfectly designed, ''jury-rigged'' adaptive
responses.  

Lambrecht’s oeuvre includes two highly influential books and over thirty
articles and book chapters, many of which investigate, in broad terms, syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics, and their interface. These works frequently analyze
French and English but also incorporate Greek, Latin, German, Italian, and
Spanish. Lambrecht’s works inspire and engage his readers through the clarity
of his prose style, the conceptual coherence and rigor of his analyses, and
the remarkable language facts that he retrieved from his overstocked
storehouse of linguistic observations--from simple patterns that theorists
have never noticed before (as in his analyses of vocatives [1996] and the
French comme N construction [1995]) to intimidatingly difficult patterns that
his work renders intuitively simple (as in his analyses of English
'incredulity responses' [1990] and English question accentuation [Lambrecht
and Michaelis 1998]). 

As a student of Professor Charles Fillmore at UC Berkeley, Lambrecht adopted
an approach to form and meaning analysis based on Construction Grammar
(Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988, Kay and Fillmore 1999). As Lambrecht
explained, the Construction Grammar framework allows researchers to analyze
constructions “as form-function pairings whose structural and semantic
properties cannot, or not entirely, be accounted for in terms of other
properties of the grammar of a language or of universal grammar and which
therefore require independent explanation” (Lambrecht 2001a:466). Lambrecht
made major contributions to Construction Grammar; these include his (1996)
Language paper, co-written with Laura Michaelis, ''Toward a Construction-based
Model of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition,'' one of the
first works on Construction Grammar to appear in a major journal. The paper is
still widely cited as a strong early demonstration of the need for
constructional type hierarchies or ''inheritance networks.'' Lambrecht’s work
has also influenced allied function-oriented theories of syntax, in particular
Role and Reference Grammar, which integrated Lambrechtian focus articulations
into its formal descriptive architecture (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997).

His important contribution to grammatical theory notwithstanding, Lambrecht
was first and foremost a specialist of French linguistics. Many of his most
noteworthy publications entailed the insightful description of frequently
overlooked grammatical constructions of spoken French. Inspired by Henri
Frei’s seminal work published in 1929, La grammaire des fautes (The Grammar of
Mistakes), Lambrecht analyzed colloquial, spoken French syntax in his early
book, Topic, Antitopic, and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French (1981). In
this book, Lambrecht pioneered the use of corpus data (the 1974 François
corpus) to explore how non-standard constructions formed the basis of the
“preferred-clause structure” of spoken French that differed in systematic ways
from the canonical sentences found in most French grammars of the day. His
contributions to French morphosyntax included a wide variety of such spoken
constructions, such as dislocations, null complements, presentational clefts,
and vocatives, to name a few. 

Lambrecht’s focus on colloquial, spoken French encountered a lot of
resistance. But with his keen ear for spoken language, it was not uncommon for
Lambrecht to point out non-standard usage to native speakers who would
sometimes accuse him of having ‘heard it wrong’, only to discover later than
he had it exactly right. One of his students once insisted that French
speakers do not drop the “ne” in spoken French, saying “Je te crois pas” (“I
don’t believe you,” with the “ne” absent), proving Lambrecht’s point. 

Lambrecht was highly regarded by his students and colleagues as a dedicated
and caring teacher with a charming sense of humor and a love of multilingual
puns. During his career, he taught a wide variety of undergraduate and
graduate courses, including Introduction to French Linguistics, Comparative
Stylistics, French Syntax and Semantics, Linguistic Approaches to Translation,
Word Order in Romance Languages, and The Grammar of Spoken French. In 1996, he
received the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for his contributions to
the undergraduate French program at UT Austin. In 2004, he was awarded the
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Prize in recognition of his inspired mentorship
of graduate students in the field. His students lauded him for helping them to
improve the rigor and clarity of their analyses, and they especially
appreciated the extensive and nuanced feedback that he routinely provided on
all their written work. In 2014, several of his graduate students, along with
colleagues and co-authors, honored him with a Festschrift entitled
Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context: Studies in Honor of Knud
Lambrecht. 

If it’s fair to draw a line from one’s political and social values to one’s
linguistic interests, it can be noted that Lambrecht was a great believer in
empathy and equity, and an opponent of arrogance and snobbery, intellectual
and otherwise, throughout his life. His focus on spoken language, and on
grammatical patterns devised for conversation, makes sense in light of his
enduring belief in human worth and his interest in the human condition. 

References

Fillmore, Charles, Paul Kay, and Catherine O'Connor. 1988. ''Regularity and
Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of let alone.'' Language
64: 501–38.
Kay , Paul and Charles J. Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical Constructions and
Linguistic Generalizations: The What's X Doing Y? Construction Language 75:
1-33.
Kuroda, Sige-Yuki 1972. The categorical and the thetic judgment. Foundations
of Language 9:153-185.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1990. “‘What, me worry?’- ‘Mad Magazine Sentences’
Revisited.” Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, 215-228.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus,
and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1995. “Compositional vs. Constructional Meaning: the Case of
French comme N.” In Proceedings of the 5th SALT Conference, ed. by T. Galloway
and M. Simons, 186-203. Cornell University.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1996. “On the Formal and Functional Relationship between
Topics and Vocatives: Evidence from French.” In Conceptual Structure,
Discourse, and Language, ed. by Adele E. Goldberg, 267-288. Stanford, CA:
CSLI.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2000a. “Prédication seconde et structure informationnelle. La
relative de perception comme construction présentative.” Langue Française 127:
49-66.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2000b. “When Subjects Behave like Objects: An Analysis of the
Merging of S and O in Sentence-focus Constructions.” Studies in Language 24
(3): 611-682.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2001a. “A Framework for the Analysis of Cleft Constructions.”
Linguistics 39 (3): 463-516.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2001b. “Dislocation.” In Language Typology and Language
Universals: An International Handbook. (Handbücher zur Sprach-und
Kommunikationswissenschaft, 20). vol. 2, ed. by Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard
König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible, 1050-1078. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Lambrecht, Knud, and Kevin Lemoine. 2005. Definite Null Objects in (spoken)
French. A Construction Grammar Account.” In Grammatical Constructions: Back to
the Roots, ed. by Mirjam Fried and Hans Boas, 157-199. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Lambrecht, Knud, and Laura A. Michaelis. 1998. ''Sentence Accent in
Information Questions: Default and Projection.'' Linguistics and Philosophy
21: 477-544.
Lambrecht, Knud, and Maria Polinsky. 1998. “Typological Variation in
Sentence-focus Constructions.” In Proceedings of the Thirty-third Annual
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Papers from the Panels, ed. by Kora
Singer et al., 189-206. Chicago, Illinois.
Michaelis, Laura A., and Knud Lambrecht. 1996. ''Toward a Construction-Based
Model of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition.'' Language 72:
215-247.
Van Valin, Robert D., and Randy J. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning
and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 


Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics



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