Prof. Dr. Nikolaus HimmelmannFull professor and chair email: nikolaus.himmelmann (please add uni-muenster.de) | ![]() |
Education and Degrees:
- 1979 - 1983 M.A. General Linguistics, Philosophy and English Philology at the University of Munich and UCLA
- 1984 - 1986 Research fellow for the UNITYP project on language universals at the University of Cologne
- February 1986 PhD. at the University of Munich
- 1989 - 1995 Assistant professor (C1) for General Linguistics at the University of Cologne
- February 1995 Habilitation at the University of Cologne
- 1996 - 1998 Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra
- 1999 – 2007 Full professor for General Linguistics (with focus on typology and language universals) at the University of Bochum
- Since September 2007, Full professor for General Linguistics at the University of Münster
Research and Teaching Interests:
- Language typology and language universals
- Theory of grammaticalization
- Linguistic theory
- Prosody and grammar
- Language documentation and description (linguistic field work)
- Languages: Austronesian languages, Papuan languages, Australian languages, Salish/Wakashan
Representative Publications (full list, with PDFs, here)
- 1997 Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase: Zur Emergenz syntaktischer Struktur, Tübingen: Niemeyer (Linguistische Arbeiten 362) 330 p.
- 2004 "Lexicalization and grammaticization: opposite or orthogonal?", in: W. Bisang, N.P. Himmelmann & B. Wiemer (eds), What makes grammaticalization - a look from its components and its fringes, 21-42, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
- 2005a (with K. A. Adelaar), eds, The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar, London: Routledge, xxii + 841 p.
- 2005b (with Eva Schultze-Berndt), eds, Secondary predication and adverbial modification. The Typology of depictives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, xxv + 448 p.
- 2006a (with J. Gippert & U. Mosel), eds, Essentials of language documentation, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Spanish translation: Bases de la documentación lingüística, John B. Haviland & José Antonio Flores Farfán (coordinadores de la versión en español), México: Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, 2007]
- 2006b "How to miss a paradigm or two: Multifunctional ma in Tagalog", in: F. Ameka, A. Dench and N. Evans (eds), Catching Language, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 487-526


