Nikolaus Ritt
Nikolaus "Niki" Ritt is Professor and Chair of English Historical Linguistics at the University of Vienna.[1] Ritt is the fifth English historical linguist since Karl Luick (1865-1935), the founder of the Vienna School of English Linguistics ("Anglistik")[2], after Hans Ernst Pinsker, Herbert Koziol, Gero Bauer, and Herbert Schendl, who held Luick's Chair for English Historical Linguistics.
Ritt is known in the field for his work on Middle English vowel length, showing that both vowel lengthening and shortening go back to one phenomenon, which Ritt calls "Early Middle English Quantity Adjustment";[3] this theory has been deemed "a plausibly coherent picture of the length adjustments"[4] that have defined English in Middle English. He has been, however, most influential through his work in cultural evolution and neo-Darwinian applications to language change ("Sprachwandel"),[5] of which he was one of the pioneers with work in this approach going back to the early 1990s.[6] A key work in Middle English vowel length is his 1994 monograph, while in cultural evolution some early papers of his were instrumental (e.g. Ritt 1994, 1995), with his 2004 monograph a key work in the area. Lately, the general framework, in the guise of complex adaptive systems, has been adopted by other historical linguists, including William A. Kretzschmar.[7] Ritt and his associates have since followed up with more in-depth applications of his framework in other areas, in which simulations of artificial languages and comparisons with actually attested language change play an important role (e.g. Ritt & Kazmierski 2016, Ritt 2016).
Select publications[edit]
- Ritt, N. & K. Kazmierski. 2016 "How rarities like gold have come to exist: on co-evolutionary interactions between morphology and lexical phonotactics". English Language and Linguistics.
- Ritt, N. 2016. "Linguistic pragmatics from an evolutionary perspective". In: Barron, A., Grundy, P. and Yueguo G. (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. London: Routledge.
- Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution: A Darwinian Approach to Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Ritt, Nikolaus. 1995. "Language change as evolution: looking for linguistic ‘genes’". VIEWS. 4(1): 43-56,
- Ritt, Nikolaus. 1994. Quantity Adjustment: Vowel Lengthening and Shortening in Early Middle English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further information[edit]
| Departmental website |
|---|
| academia.edu |
| Google scholar |
| researchgate.net |
References[edit]
- ↑ "University of Vienna Department of English". Retrieved January 20, 2018.
- ↑ "Academy of Europe". Retrieved January 20, 2018.
- ↑ Raymond Hickey; Stanislav Puppel (1 January 1997). Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday. Walter de Gruyter. p. 19. ISBN 978-3-11-082075-1. Retrieved January 20, 2018. Search this book on
- ↑ Nathan, Geoffrey S. (March 1997). "Review of Ritt, Nikolaus. 1995. Quantity Adjustment: Vowel Lengthening and Shortening in Early Middle English by Nikolaus Ritt". Language. Vol. 73, No. 1: 182–185 – via JSTOR.
- ↑ "Google Scholar". Retrieved January 20, 2018.
- ↑ Ritt, Nikolaus (1995). "Language change as evolution: looking for linguistic 'genes'". VIEWS. 4(1): 43–56 – via https://archiv-anglistik.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/dep_anglist/weitere_Uploads/Views/views951.pdf.
- ↑ Kretzschmar, William A. (2015). Language and Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Search this book on
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