31.3755, All: Obituary: Ferenc Kiefer (1931-2020)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3755. Mon Dec 07 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3755, All: Obituary: Ferenc Kiefer (1931-2020)

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Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:15:43
From: István Kenesei [kenesei at nytud.hu]
Subject: Obituary: Ferenc Kiefer (1931-2020)

 
Ferenc Kiefer, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, winner of the
prestigious Széchenyi Prize and the Gold Medal of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, Professor Emeritus of Eötvös Loránd University, member of the
Academia Europaea, London, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the European
Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paris, died on November 21, 2020, not long
before his 90th birthday. He was also Honorary Member of the American
Linguistic Society and of the British Philological Society, Doctor Honoris
Causa of the Universities of Stockholm, Paris and Szeged, former Director of
the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
President of CIPL between 2003 and 2013, a teacher and inspirational patron of
generations of young linguists.

He was born in Apatin, Yugoslavia, but his family moved to Baja, Southern
Hungary, following World War Two. He first graduated from the University of
Szeged with a degree in mathematics and physics and became interested in
German dialects as a practicing teacher in Baja. He turned to general
linguistics at the encouragement of linguists in Budapest and, after
completing his German and then French correspondence courses in Szeged, he got
a job at the Eötvös József Secondary School in Budapest. From here he joined
the newly formed mathematical linguistics research group at the Computer
Science Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1962. From 1973 he was
first a research fellow at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the HAS,
rising later to the top rank of scientific advisor, and, between 1992 and
2001, its director. At the same time, he taught general linguistics at ELTE,
and then became a founding professor and chair of the Department of
Theoretical Linguistics, established jointly by RIL HAS and Eötvös University.
He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1971, obtained his academic doctorate
in 1977, became a corresponding member at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in
1987, and a full member in 1995.

>From the late 1960s, he taught regularly at universities in Stockholm,
Stuttgart, Aarhus, Paris, and Vienna, but always returned to Hungary, where he
organized international conferences to promote personal communication between
Eastern European and Western linguists in addition to a large number of
collections of papers edited by him and printed by first class publishers,
through which he gave an opportunity to linguists on the far side of the Iron
Curtain to publish for an international audience. He was a true éminence grise
of the East-West scientific dialogue, the importance of which was little
recognized, except perhaps by the organs of the state security.

Thanks to his background in mathematics, he easily embraced the trends in
formal linguistics arising in the 1960s. He started by disseminating Chomsky’s
generative linguistics, in particular syntax, in Hungary, then he became more
and more interested in the problems of morphology (word formation,
compounding) and, on the other side of the grammatical divide, in the study of
semantics and pragmatics, where he could put to use his erudition in logic.
His books and articles on the theory of presuppositions, the formal and
semantic properties of aspect, and the nature of compounding have elicited
considerable international response, and he is considered to be among the
best-known experts in these fields to date.

Although he was not a field linguist, he was not a scientist confined to his
office. He had friends all over the world, and his knowledge of several
languages made him capable of communicating with everyone in and outside the
field. His genial personality, humor, constant smile, and remarks spiced with
occasional irony were his trademark. His musical education was also
outstanding, he was an avid reader of literature, a concert and theatre goer,
and a true gourmet, who loved life in its entirety.

His disciples, friends, and colleagues will preserve his memory.
 


Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics



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