Ferenc Kiefer, the doyen of Hungarian linguists, a highly esteemed member of the international linguistic community, editor emeritus of Acta Linguistica Academica, passed away on November 21, 2020, at the age of 90. He was a member of Academia Europaea (London) and l'Académie européenne des sciences et des arts (Paris), president of CIPL (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes) between 2003 and 2013, a member of the Hungarian and the Austrian Academies of Sciences, an honorary doctor of Université Paris-XIII, Stockolm University, and the University of Szeged, and an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America and the Philological Society of Great Britain. He was director of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for a long period; he taught at Eötvös Loránd University, and he was a regular guest professor at the universities of Stockholm, Stuttgart, Aarhus, Paris, and Vienna. The two dozen books and the more than 200 scholarly papers written by him have shaped semantics (the theories of presupposions and aspect, among others), morphology (the theories of compounding and derivation), pragmatics (the pragmatics of modality), as well as syntax (information structure). The four-volume Strukturális magyar nyelvtan (Structural Grammar of Hungarian), edited and partly written by him, the syntax volume of which was also published in English (The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian, Syntax and Semantics vol. 27, Academic Press, New York 1994), is the best-thumbed handbook of Hungarian grammar.

We Hungarian linguists also have reasons beyond his scholarly work to be thankful to Ferenc Kiefer. Nobody has done more for the substantive and institutional modernization of linguistics in Hungary and for its integration into the international academic world than he did. The early 1960s, when his career started, was a period of complete isolation for Hungarian linguistics, mainly due to the inaccessibility of international linguistic journals and foreign books, and the impossibility of international scholarly relations and trips to the West. Hungarian linguists continued the pre-structuralist descriptive and historical linguistic tradition – partly in defense from the ideologically-politically determined turnarounds (Marrism and anti-Marrism) of Soviet linguistics. Despite these circumstances, Ferenc Kiefer and a few members of his generation came to know about the generative linguistic revolution, and in a brief period of thawing around 1964, they had a chance to study generative linguistics with Ford-scholarships at the best universities of the USA. When they returned to Hungary, they started disseminating what they had learned there. They taught generative linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University, and also organized informal study circles for linguists from other universities.

Ferenc Kiefer brought home not only the knowledge of generative theory (along with a book he wrote On Emphasis and Word Order, published by Indiana University, Bloomington), but also the knowledge of the sociology of modern science and the importance of networking. He developed close friendships with leading linguists of the time, and he invited them to Hungary as his personal guests. His personal charisma: his wit, his erudition, his deep knowledge of classical music, his humor, and his culinary art attracted several great linguists to Budapest, where he put them in touch with his students and young colleagues. The guests he invited later supported the young linguists they got to know in Hungary by invitations and fellowships. He never ceased to strive to bring together linguists from East and West. The International Morphology Meeting, a conference held in Central Europe for the 19th time this year, well illustrates the viability and success of his initiatives.

Ferenc Kiefer introduced to the journals and books edited by him the editorial standards he attested in the USA, including not only requirements such as emphasis on the theoretical relevance of the analyses, an up-to-date theoretical background, or the adoption of the methodology of an internationally accepted framework, but also the double-blind reviewing of the studies – which helped Hungarian linguists find their way to international journals and international scientific publishers. He was among the initiators of the ERIH index of linguistics journals, whose criteria largely contributed to the prevalence of the above editorial practices also in local linguistics journals in Hungary and beyond.

Ferenc Kiefer completed a very successful, very productive life. His achievements have institutionalized; his results live on in our models of human language; and his likeable personality will live on in our memories.