Respondent

Kurzbiografie und Publikationen

Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Ritt, Vizedekan der Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik,  Universität Wien

Nikolaus Ritt is professor of English Historical Linguistics at Vienna University. He got his PhD at Vienna in 1990 with a thesis on changes of vowel Quantity in Early Middle English. (Quantity Adjustment, Cambridge University Press, 1994). Educated in the theoretical framework of Natural Linguistics (going back to David Stampe and developed in Vienna by Wolfgang Dressler and his research group), his main concern is to combine the functionalist tenets of linguistic naturalism with the insight that languages are historical systems whose constituents owe their existence to being successfully transmitted among speakers and speaker generations. As outlined in the programmatic volume Selfish Sounds (Cambridge University Press, 2004), he is working on a research program that views languages as systems of replicating competence constituents, which undergo a generalized type of Darwinian evolution. While the physiology, as well as the communicative, cognitive and social needs of speakers are seen as crucial factors in the selection of constituent variants, Ritt’s current research focuses primarily on potential co-adaptive relations between competence constituents, which he thinks might explain the systemic coherence of individual languages as well as the seemingly directed long term developments they often undergo.

Publications (selection)

• Ritt, Nikolaus. forthc.  "Internal and external factors in the long-term evolution of English sounds". In: Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo; Denison, David; McCully, Christopher; Moore, Emma (eds.). 2010. Analysing Older English. Cambridge: University Press.
• Ritt, Nikolaus. forthc.  "Evolutionary theories of language: theories and methods". In: Kortmann, Bernd and Johannes Kabatek (eds.). Linguistic theory and methodology. (WSK-Dictionaries of Language and Communication Science). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ritt, Nikolaus. forthc.  "Memes and language". In: Hogan, Patrick C. (ed.) The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences. Cambridge: University Press. s.v.
• Ritt, Nikolaus. forthc.  "Middle English: Phonology". in: Bergs, Alexander and Laurel Brinton (eds.). Historical linguistics of English: An international handbook. (Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Science). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Ritt, Nikolaus. forthc.  "Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: system, usage, change". In: SELIM: Journal of the Spanish society of medieval English language and literature. 17/2010.
• Ritt, Nikolaus. 2007. "Meaning in a material world or How to find out what linguists think about meaning." In: Fabiszak, Małgorzata (ed.). Language and Meaning. Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 235-269.
• Ritt, Nikolaus. 2007. "It seemed like a good idea at the time: why there may not have been any early Modern English shortening before dentals after all." In: Smit, U. et al. (eds.) Tracing English through time. Explorations in language variation. Vienna: Braumüller, 315-331.
• Ritt, Nikolaus; Schendl, Herbert; Dalton-Puffer, Christiane; Kastovsky, Dieter (eds.) 2006. Medieval English and its heritage: structure, meaning and mechanisms of change. (Studies in English medieval language and literature 16).  Frankfurt: Lang.