Ferenc Kiefer

After graduating, he was a primary school teacher at a secondary school in Baja between 1957 and 1961, and then taught at the Eötvös József High School in Budapest until 1962. In 1965, he earned a doctorate from the József Attila University (JATE).

From 1962, as a scientific associate at the Institute of Computer Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he wrote his first study on linguistics: Set-theoretic and mathematical-logical models in language.

From 1973 he was a senior research fellow and later a scientific advisor at the Institute of Linguistics (NYTI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1984 and 1992 he was the deputy director of the institute, and between 1992 and 2002 its director.

Meanwhile, in 1982 he became a professor at the Department of General Linguistics at ELTE, and later at the Department of Symbolic Logic and Scientific Methodology. Since 2002 he has been professor emeritus.

He was a visiting professor at several foreign institutions. First, between 1969 and 1971 at Stockholm University – after which he prepared the first Swedish-Hungarian dictionary. He was also a visiting professor in Paris (1971–1972, 1978–1979, 1994), Stuttgart (1971–1972), Aarhus (1977), Antwerp (1984) and Vienna (1986, 1988, 2002). Between 1965 and 1966 he was a Ford Scholar in the USA. In 1993 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the universities of Stockholm and Sorbonne Paris Nord.

He defended his candidate's thesis in linguistics in 1971 and his academic doctorate in 1978. He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1987 and a full member in 1995. In 1993, he was elected a member of the European Academy in London, in 1995 of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Paris, and in 1996 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Member of the Linguistics Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Literature between 1999 and 2008. Chair of the International Linguistics Association in 2003. Editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Acta Linguistica since 1993.

His research interests include linguistic semantics and pragmatics, as well as the areal effect of languages. During his work, he reformed the research on the morphological features of the Hungarian language, where he developed and applied new methods. His results are significant in the fields of meaning research (semantics) and linguistic pragmatics.

Awards: Bernát Munkácsi Award (2000); Széchenyi Award (2008); Academic Gold Medal (MTA Lifetime Achievement Award, 2018).