Speaker: Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, Professor, University of Vienna, Austria

On 16 December 2020, the CFLC offered an academic lecture entitled “Language Typology and its Impact on Language Learning" held by Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, Professor. Owing to the epidemic, the lecture was organized online and was attended by numerous UIC teachers and students. Prof. Carlotta Viti introduced the speaker and moderated the event.

Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, full professor emeritus at the University of Vienna (Austria), is a world-renowned linguist, with teaching and research appointments in different universities of Europe and of America and hundreds of publications on different fields of linguistics, ranging from historical linguistics and Indo-European studies to general linguistics and typology. His main research interests reside in phonology, morphology, semiotics, text linguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition. He is a co-founder of the theory of ‘Natural Morphology’, which investigates the principles of a ‘natural’ grammatical system as well the deviations from that – cf. his pioneering monograph Morphology (1985). He is also interested in endangered languages and language death, as can be seen from his fieldwork on Breton (a Celtic language, now in decay, spoken in Brittany, France). There is hardly a linguistic topic that Wolfgang U. Dressler left untouched, and his views have largely contributed to the theoretical development of linguistics as a scientific discipline.

Prof. Dressler’s conference discussed topics of general linguistics on the basis of examples drawn from different language families and from different areas of the world, according to the approach of linguistic typology. It especially focused on morphology, which is a linguistic area of little importance in Chinese, but, with typological variations, of great importance in most foreign languages commonly studied in China. Within this area, there was a second focus on research in which the speaker and his research associates have been involved themselves. This comprises typological criteria wich are both important for the theory of language typology and for its impact on the ease of language acquisition, where 1. first language acquisition, 2. second language acquisition and 3. foreign language acquisition must be distinguished. The conference combined an updated perspective on linguistic typology with the author’s original research on morphology, language acquisition and language learning.

After the lecture, Prof. Dressler UIC interacted with several UIC staff and students in an interesting discussion about language variety and linguistic typology. He also expressed in interest in future collaborations with UIC.