Manfred Krifka

Manfred Krifka (born 26 April 1956 in Dachau) is a German linguist. He was the director of the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, ZAS) in Berlin, and professor of general linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was editor of the academic journal He is editor of the academic journal Linguistics and Philosophy from 1999 to 2023 and is editor of Theoretical Linguistics

Career and education
Krifka graduated from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1986 in Theoretical Linguistics, Philosophy and Theory of Science, and Psycholinguistics. He consequently held positions at the University of Tübingen 1986 - 1989, at the University of Texas at Austin 1990-2000, and at Humboldt University of Berlin 2000 - 2022. Starting in 2001 until November 2022, he has been the director of the Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Centre for General Linguistics), since 2017 Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS); since 2023 he is Senior Fellow at ZAS.

Work
Krifka's main areas of research are linguistic semantics, pragmatics, language typology and Melanesian languages, especially languages of Ambrym, in particular Daakie, or Port Vato language, and the Creole language Bislama. He has done substantial works on the meaning of nouns, in particular mass nouns and count nouns, on grammatical aspect, generic sentences, polarity items and negation, quantification and vagueness, information structure, anaphora, discourse, questions, response particles and speech acts.

Awards and distinctions
Krifka was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 1995-1996 and of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in 1997. He received the Meyer-Struckmann Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences for his work on language and cognition in 2021, a Honorary Membership of the Linguistic Society of America in 2023 and the Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize of the German Society of Linguistics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) in 2024.