Manfred Krifka
Manfred Krifka is a German linguist. He is the director of the Leibniz-Centre of General Linguistics in Berlin, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and editor of the academic journal 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 - current. He is director at the Leibniz Centre General Linguistics since 2001.Work
Krifka's main areas of research are linguistic semantics, pragmatics, language typology and Melanesian languages, especially languages of Ambrym. He has done substantial works on the meaning of nouns, in particular mass nouns and count nouns, on grammatical aspect, generic sentences, polarity items, information structure, questions and speech acts.
