Obituary Manfred Bierwisch

Manfred Bierwisch

July 28, 1930 – July 31,  2024

He was a legend. He was an eminent scholar. He was an honest person in difficult times. He was a strong ally to our institute, of which he has been an external scientific member since 1985. And above all, he was a wonderful friend for many in Nijmegen and elsewhere. Plain facts can never give a worthy picture of his kindness.

Born on July 28, 1930 in Halle, Manfred studied German philology in Leipzig with Theodor Frings, Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer from 1951 – 1956. No, that is not correct: in 1952, he was arrested for political reasons and sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he served 10. After his release due to an amnesty, he was allowed to resume his studies.

In 1956, he became a research assistant at the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. In 1961, he received his doctorate in Leipzig with a thesis Zur Morphologie des deutschen Verbalsystems. Published in revised and extended form two years later as Grammatik des deutschen Verbs, it became a classic; in the first ten years alone, it was reprinted eight times: a milestone, the first German grammar which merged solid philological expertise with principles of the then still young generative linguistics.

From 1962 until 1973, he was a member of the “Arbeitsstelle Stukturelle Grammatik”, a small group of young linguists who rapidly gained international reputation with him as its figurehead. In 1973, the Arbeitsstelle was dissolved, but Manfred could continue his work at the Academy. He was not allowed to travel abroad; but numerous visitors, mostly from West Germany and the US, came to see him in Berlin, usually in his one-room flat in the Bürgerheimstrasse; the flat was bugged, and many years later, he could study the transcriptions of the these discussions. In 1978, the vice-president of the Academy Werner Kalweit began to support him; in particular, he made it possible for him to accept an invitation to the Netherlands – to the “Projektgruppe [1980: Institute] für Psycholinguistik” in Nijmegen.

That changed his life.

Red beards

From the files of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 9 June 1978: “Mein Besuch in Ost-Berlin sowie alle weiteren telefonischen und schriftlichen Kontakte haben dazu geführt, daß Prof. Bierwisch die Gelegenheit erhält, drei Monate nach Nijmegen zu kommen. ... Offiziell wird Prof. Bierwisch nicht von der MPG eingeladen, und es soll kein direkter Briefwechsel mit ihm geführt werden."

(gez. Levelt). [My visit to East Berlin and all further telephone and written contacts led to Prof. Bierwisch being given the opportunity to come to Nijmegen for three months. ... Officially, Prof Bierwisch will not be invited by the MPG, and there will be no direct correspondence with him. (signed Levelt).]

When I phoned him in April 1979, we agreed that I would pick him up at Nijmegen station for that visit which was officially not allowed to be. I said: "We don't know each other, I have a red beard." And he said: "Me too".

A few days after his arrival in Nijmegen, Chomsky was due to give a series of lectures in Pisa, which subsequently turned generative grammar once more upside down under the label "Lectures on Government and Binding". A dream would have come true for Manfred to attend, but with his GDR passport he wasn't allowed to go to Italy. So Pim Levelt called the foreign minister, who contacted the Italian ambassador, who sent someone to the embassy on a Sunday to issue a visa for Manfred. He was the only one whom Chomsky invited to dinner with his family; Pim had introduced them to each other.

The flight back was an adventure because the visa was one day too short. I told him: "What can they do when you leave the country but kick you out" (that would have been different at the GDR border). There were actually checks at the airport in Milan. Just before it was my turn (before Manfred's), I caused a little commotion by suddenly changing lines. The people behind me then marched through, including Manfred, and the officers checked me seriously, but didn't cause any trouble.

Friends forever

Forty-five years later, the beards were no longer red, but the friendship was still green. Six days before he died, I got his last letter, brief, because he had problems with writing. In it, he referred to that time in Nijmegen and Pisa, and he said that his life afterwards was a different one. And it was. In 1980, the Academy entrusted him with a small research group “Cognitive Linguistics”, whose work was devoted to the interface between syntactic, semantic and cognitive structure. He now became a regular guest in Nijmegen, sometimes together with his wife Monika Doherty who wrote there most of her wonderful book “Das grammatische Varieté” (published 1991 under her pen name Judith Macheiner). In 1985, the regular guest was made an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society.

No one expected the next turn – “die Wende” in 1989. The two Germanies became one again, the huge old Academy of the GDR and the small young Academy of Berlin became one under the new name Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). Manfred was a member of the founding committee, and in 1993, he was elected vice-president of an institution that was founded in 1700 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, where Albert Einstein created his “Allgemeine Relativitätstheorie” and whose secretary of the science class from 1912-1938 was Max-.Planck. That must have been a glorious triumph for someone who, as he told me, “in 45 Jahren nicht einmal einen eigenen Tisch in der Akademie hatte” [in 45 years he didn't even have his own table at the Academy].

He, however, considered the appointment a task. His own research was no longer done at the Academy but at the Humboldt University where the Max Planck Society granted him an Arbeitsstelle Strukturelle Grammatik from 1992 until his retirement in 1998. Honorary doctors, honorary professorships, honorary memberships of other academies, honorary member of the LSA followed. He liked his honors, but he loved his research, and until two weeks before his death, he worked together with Hans Kamp and with me about some oddities of “polar adjectives” like long-short, old-young, big-small.

That work remained unfinished.

A selection of his publications

Manfred Bierwisch’s work over more than sixty years had its focus on the structural side of human language – phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. But human language has other sides of which he was well aware. A small selection from his about 200 publications may give an impression of the range of his interests (click here for a full list).

• Bierwisch, M. (2020): Musik und Sprache. Überlegungen zu ihrer Struktur und Funktionsweise. In: Christina Grüny und Katrin Eggers (eds.), Musik und Geste - Theorien, Ansätze, Perspektiven. 243–267. München: Fink.
• Bierwisch, M. (2019): Semantic features and primes. In: Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics - Lexical Structures and Adjectives. 1-46. De Gruyter: Berlin.
• Bierwisch, M. (2012): The Concept of Evolution in Linguistics. In: Aldo Fasolo (ed.), The Theory of Evolution and Its Impact. 103-117. Mailand: Springer.
• Bierwisch, M. (2011): Completeness and limitation of natural languages. In: Linguistics - An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences Band 49: 4: 791–833.
• Bierwisch, M. (2008): Linguistik, Poetik, Ästhetik. In: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 38: 33-55.
• Bierwisch, M. (2008): Die Entwicklung des Gehirns und der Sprache. In: J. Klose & J. Oehler (eds.), Gott oder Darwin - Vernünftiges Reden über Schöpfung und Evolution, 173-200. Berlin: Springer.
• Bierwisch, M. (2006): Thematic Roles – Universal, Particular, and Idiosyncratic Aspects. In: I. Bornkessel et al (eds.), Semantic Role Universals and Argument Linking: Theoretical, Typological, and Psycholinguistic Perspectives, 89-126. Berlin:  de Gruyter.
• Bierwisch, M. (2001): The Apparent Paradox of Language Evolution: Can Universal Grammar be Explained by Adaptive Selection? In: J. Trabant & S. Ward (eds.), New Essays on the Origin of Language, 55-79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Bierwisch, M. (2001): Repertoires of Primitive Elements: Prerequisite or result of acquisition? In: J. Weissenborn & B. Höhle (eds.), Approaches to Bootstrapping : Phonological, Lexical, Syntactic and Neurophysiological Aspects of Early Language Acquisition, Vol. 2, 281-307. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Bierwisch, M. (2001): Marxismus und Sprachwissenschaft - das Missverhältnis von Ideologie und Wissenschaft. In: V. Gerhard (ed.), Marxismus : Versuch einer Bilanz, 39-67. Magdeburg: Scriptum-Verl.
• Bierwisch, M. (1997): Universal Grammar and the Basic Variety. In: Second Language Research 13 (1997)4: 348-366.
• Bierwisch, M. (1996): How much space gets into language? In: P. Bloom, M. Peterson, L. Nadel & M. F. Garrett (eds.), Language and Space, 31-76. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press.
• Bierwisch, M. (1992): Recht linguistisch gesehen. In: Günther Grewendorf (ed.), Rechtskultur als Sprachkultur, 42-68. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
• Bierwisch, M. (1992): Probleme der biologischen Erklärung natürlicher Sprache. In: P. Suchsland (ed.),Soziale und biologische Bedingungen der natürlichen Sprache, 7-45. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Bierwisch, M. & Rob Schreuder (1992): From Concepts to Lexical Items: In: Cognition 42: 23-60.
• Bierwisch, M. (1990): Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Language: Linguistics as a Cognitive Science or Touring the Chinese Room Again. In: A. Burkhardt (ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions 391-428. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• M. Bierwisch & E. Lang, Dimensional Adjectives. Berlin: Springer.
• Bierwisch, M. (1988): Language Varieties and Connotation. In: U. Ammon et al. (eds.), Sociolinguistics : An International Handbook of the science of Language and Society, 1108-1118. Berlin: de Gruyter
• Bierwisch, M. (1986): On the Nature of Semantic Form in Natural Language. In: F. Klix & H. Hagendorf (eds.), Human Memory and Cognitive, 765-784, Amsterdam: North-Holland.
• Bierwisch, M. (1984): Essays in the Psychology of Language.  Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
• Bierwisch, M. (1983): How On-line is Language Processing? In: F. B. Flores d'Arcais & R. I. Jarvella (eds.), The Process of Language Understanding, 113-168. New York: John Wiley.
• Bierwisch, M. (1982): Linguistics and Language Error. In: A. Cutler (ed.), Slips of the Tongue and Language Production, 29-72. Berlin et al.: Mouton. 
• Bierwisch, M. (1981): Basic Issues in the Development of Word Meaning. In: W. Deutsch (ed.), The Child's Construction of Language, 341-387. London et al.: Academic Press.
• Bierwisch, M., Ferenc Kiefer & John R. Searle, eds. (1980): Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel. [with his chapter  Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force. p.1-35]. Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Bierwisch, M., ed. (1979): Psychologische Effekte sprachlicher Strukturkomponenten. Berlin: Akademie-Verl., 1979 and München: Fink, 1980
• Bierwisch, M. (1979): Musik und Sprache : Überlegungen zu ihrer Struktur und Funktionsweise. In: E. Klemm (ed.), Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters  9-102. Leipzig: Peters.
• Bierwisch, M. (1976): Social Differentation of Language Structure. In: A. Kasher (ed.), Language in Focus, 407-456. Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Bierwisch, M. (1975): Psycholinguistik. Interdependenz kognitiver Prozesse und linguistischer Strukturen. In: Zeitschrift für Psychologie 183: 1-52.
• Bierwisch, M. (1972): Schriftstruktur und Phonologie. In: Probleme und Ergebnisse der Psychologie 43:21-44. 
• Bierwisch, M. & Karl Erich Heidolph, eds. (1970): Progress in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton.
• Bierwisch, M. (1970): Fehler-Linguistik. In: Linguistic Inquiry 1: 397-414. [the only German paper in that journal ever]
• Bierwisch, M. & Egon Weigl (1970): Neuropsychology and Linguistics. In:Foundations of Language 6:1-21.
• Bierwisch, M. (1968): Two Critical Problems in Accent Rules. In: Journal of Linguistics 4:173-178.
• Bierwisch, M. (1967): Some Semantic Universals of German Adjectivals. In: Foundations of Language : International Journal of Language and Philosophy 3: 1-36.
• Bierwisch, M. (1966): Strukturalismus: Geschichte, Methoden, Probleme. In: Kursbuch 5,77-152.Frankfurt/M.:Suhrkamp.
• Bierwisch, M. (1966): Regeln für die Intonation deutscher Sätze. In: Studia grammatica 7,99-201.Berlin:Akademie-Verl. 
• Bierwisch, M. (1965): Poetik und Linguistik. In: H. Kreuzer & R. Gunzenhäuser (eds.), Mathematik und Dichtung, 49-66. München: Nymphenburger.
• Bierwisch, M. (1963): Grammatik des deutschen Verbs. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
• Bierwisch, M. (1960): Zur Morphologie des deutschen Verbalsystems. Diss. Leipzig.

And not by Manfred, but for Manfred: when he turned 50 in 1980, a few friends in Berlin compiled a Festschrift for him; alas, its publication was not allowed. So, our institute compiled one:
W. Klein und W.J.M Levelt, eds. (1981), Crossing the boundaries in linguistics. Studies presented to Manfred Bierwisch. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Manfred Bierwisch was an extraordinary person with an extraordinary fate. He will be deeply missed.

Wolfgang Klein
Director Emeritus