Wolfgang U. Dressler

Wolfgang U. Dressler (born 22 December 1939) is an Austrian professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna. Dressler is an eminent scholar who has contributed to various fields of linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, text linguistics, clinical linguistics and child language development. He is one of the most important representatives of the 'naturalness theory'.

After studying linguistics and classical philology in Vienna (1957–1962), Dressler spent time in Rome and Paris, works both at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Vienna, finishing his habilitation in 1968. In 1970, he went to the USA working as associate professor and returned to Vienna in 1971, when he was appointed professor for general and applied linguistics at the University of Vienna. Since then, Dressler has been based there, while still travelling and teaching at other universities all the time.

Dressler has authored more than 400 publications, some of which were groundbreaking for various sub-disciplines of linguistics. To name a few, the following selection of some of his monographs may give some insight:

In the beginning of his career, Dressler worked on Indo-European topics. After 1969, he began publishing in the field of text linguistics. Following a few publications within the then new framework of generative grammar, he permanently turned away from this model and has become a profound critic with a strong science-theoretical and semiotic background.

Around the same time, Dressler worked on Breton language from a phonological, text linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective ('language death'). At that time morphology, phonology and morphonology were also of interest to him. Since 1972, what was later called 'sociophonology' has been developed, first as 'fast speech rules', later in a refined model on 'casual speech' and competing phonological processes and rules.

From 1973 onwards, in search of 'external evidence' for linguistic theoretical assumptions (as opposed to generative models, but as an important science-theoretical background for theoretical arguments), Dressler became interested in the disturbed speech of aphasia. Similarly, he started to work with psychologists on a model of psychological '(de)activation' for phonological processes and, with his background in IE studies, he compared historical evidence with his phonological theory, making conclusions about rules, processes and the boundaries of phonological theory towards morpho(no)logy.

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