Heinz Giegerich


Heinz Joachim Giegerich is a Scottish linguist of German nationality, and Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics in the of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Biography

Born 1952 in Aachen and brought up in the nearby town of Eschweiler, Professor Giegerich studied English Linguistics, General Linguistics, English Literature and Journalism at the University of Mainz, graduating Magister Artium in 1978 under the supervision of Professors Klaus Faiss and Gerhard Wahrig. He joined the in 1979 as a lecturer and completed his PhD there in 1983 under the supervision of John M Anderson. He was Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts from 2000 to 2003 and Head of the Department of English Language from 2001 until its merger with Linguistics in 2005. He was the Director of the university's from 2012 to 2018 and retired from the university in 2019. He was a Trustee of the until 2024 and is an Honorary Member of the Angus McIntosh Centre and a Fellow of the . He lives in in the Scottish Borders.
His research and teaching focused on phonological and morphological theory, especially in relation to English and German. His particular research interests have included the following:
  • the representation of prosodic structure within the theory of Metrical Phonology
  • stress, poetic metre and more generally aspects of prosodic structure in the history of English
  • the status of orthography in phonological structures, and in phonological theory in general
  • the distinction between 'lexical' and 'postlexical' phenomena, both in morphology and phonology
  • the theory of "base-driven lexical stratification", which he developed in the 1990s
  • the interfaces of the morphology with the phonology and the syntax
  • the study of morphological and syntactic phenomena which suggest that lexical levels, as well as the morphology and the syntax, are not discrete modules of the grammar but overlap with each other
  • the analysis of compound words within the theory of Lexicalism
Heinz Giegerich is the founder of the and was the General Editor of the series until 2024. He was one of the founding Editors of the linguistic morphology journal, Word Structure.

Publications

His major publications include the following:Metrical phonology and phonological structure: German and English ''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.English phonology: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lexical strata in English: morphological causes, phonological effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Lexical structures: compounding and the modules of grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.