29.1070, All: Obituary: Alexander Kautzsch (1969 – 2018)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1070. Thu Mar 08 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1070, All: Obituary: Alexander Kautzsch (1969 – 2018)

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Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2018 09:14:56
From: Edgar Schneider [Edgar.Schneider at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de]
Subject: Obituary: Alexander Kautzsch (1969 – 2018)

 
With incredible grief I have to pass on the sad news that PD Dr. Alexander
Kautzsch (University of Regensburg) passed away after a severe heart attack.
He was torn out of the midst of life by a tragic fate.

Alex was a wonderful, caring academic teacher; students loved him and his
classes and profited immensely from his courses. He was a superb linguist. His
dissertation, published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2002 (The Historical Evolution
of Earlier African American English. An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources)
pulled together various sources to trace the history of AAVE from a
variationist perspective; it is often quoted in writings on the subject. His
post-doctoral second book (a German Habilitationsschrift) investigated
constraints on second-language phonology acquisition (The Attainment of an
English Accent: British and American Features in Advanced German Learners.
Peter Lang 2017). More recently, his research moved into new directions, for
instance by developing a model of the evolution of English in both colonial
and non-postcolonial contexts (with Sarah Buschfeld, published in World
Englishes 2017) or with extensive work and corpus compilation on Namibian
English. 

But above all Alex was a wonderful person, a good friend to many of us, a
caring colleague, always accessible and willing to help, spreading a jovial,
friendly spirit. We keep his memory in our hearts. Our prayers and thoughts
are with his family.

Edgar Schneider
for the team of English linguists at the University of Regensburg
 


Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     General Linguistics



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