Knud Lambrecht

Posted: November 2019

The LSA is saddened to announce the passing of former LSA member Knud Lambrecht, who was a Professor Emeritus of French Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and passed away on September 6, 2019, at the age of 80.

Lambrecht was highly regarded by his students and colleagues as a dedicated and caring teacher with a charming sense of humor and a love of multilingual puns. During his career, he taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Introduction to French Linguistics, Comparative Stylistics, French Syntax and Semantics, Linguistic Approaches to Translation, Word Order in Romance Languages, and The Grammar of Spoken French. In 1996, he received the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for his contributions to the undergraduate French program at UT Austin. In 2004, he was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Prize in recognition of his inspired mentorship of graduate students in the field. His students lauded him for helping them to improve the rigor and clarity of their analyses, and they especially appreciated the extensive and nuanced feedback that he routinely provided on all their written work. In 2014, several of his graduate students, along with colleagues and co-authors, honored him with a Festschrift entitled Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and Context: Studies in Honor of Knud Lambrecht.

This excerpt was taken from an obituary prepared by Laura A. Michaelis, a close collaborator of Professor Lambrecht’s in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Carl Blyth, Professor Lambrecht's former colleague in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. Find the full prepared obituary here.