Prof. Dr. Tilman Berger

 (born in 1956 Passau)

After the final secondary-school examinations (Abitur) at Heidelberg he studied Russian and Mathematics in Heidelberg, Prague and Constance (1975–82) and finished his studies with the state exam in both subjects. In May 1986 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz (Constance) with a dissertation on “Word Formation and Accent in Russian” (Wortbildung und Akzent im Russischen). From February 1986 until February 1988 he worked in a research project on anaphorical means of Russian at the University of Hamburg. From March 1988 until September 1993 he was assistant professor at the Department of Slavic Philology at the University of Munich. There he earned his postdoctoral lecturing qualification (Habilitation) in February 1994 with a thesis on “The System of Czech Demonstrative Pronouns – Grammatological and Style-Specific Conditions of Use (Das System der tschechischen De¬monstrativpronomina – Textgrammatische und stilspezifische Gebrauchsbedingun¬gen”. As a substitute he held the position of a full professor of Slavic linguistics at the Department of Slavistics at the University of Tübingen beginning in October of 1993, where he was then appointed full professor on September 27, 1994. From 1995 to 1999 he held the position of deputy dean, responsible for academic affairs at the Faculty of Modern Languages. From 2000 to 2004 he was the dean of the faculty. He is one of the editors of Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie and since 2007 a member of the editorial board of Slovo a slovesnost. Since 2008 he is also a member of the Review Board 104 “Linguistics” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

His first bohemistic studies concentrated on issues concerning anaphora and deixis, and especially the use of demonstrative pronouns in Czech. Other studies, some of them diachronic, concentrated on the relations between Czech and Slovak or dealt with older periods of the Czech language, especially in the field of historical phonology, the relations between Czech and German, the Czech language of the 18th century and the problematic of verbal aspect. His studies on the field of Russian linguistics concentrate on accentology, text linguistics, pragmatics and the study of politeness and address systems.