Former employee at the Central Institute for Linguistics of the Academy of the Sciences of the GDR (Berlin)

Until her retirement, Dr. Dr. h.c. Ilse Zimmermann worked for many years at the Central Institute for Linguistics, in whose tradition the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) is steeped. She was a pioneer of generative grammar in Germany, had contributed to the large collective projects of the Central Institute as well as to the main features of German grammar and had made important contributions to the grammar of many languages, especially German and Slavic, in many individual publications. Syntax and morphology were particularly close to Ilse Zimmermann's heart, and formal correctness was just as important to her as a clear, explicit formulation of her relationship to semantics.