André Hantson

Professor of English and General Linguistics

Along with his compagnons de route in linguistics, Prof. Manfred Peters and Father Jacques Weisshaupt, Prof. André Hantson belongs to the second generation of academic recruits at Namur. He arrived in 1968 – that magic year when there was “Something in the Air” whichever way you looked – to help Prof. Somers with the English language and linguistics courses.

Born on 9 March 1942, André Hantson pursued his secondary studies at the Sint-Antonius College in Ronse. He was lucky enough to have excellent and inspirational language teachers, including Mr Norbert De Paepe, who later went on to become a university professor himself (Medieval Dutch Literature at the University of Leuven). Mr Hantson’s secondary-school programme did not include Latin or Greek (then a precondition for students in Germanic Philology!), which made it necessary for him to master these classical languages by himself in order to gain access to Ghent University...

As a student in Ghent André Hantson was as passionate about German and its literature as he was about English linguistics, but it was the latter interest that eventually prevailed and soon turned into a lifelong vocation... After a spell as a teacher at secondary-school level, which gave him a solid practical foundation in language teaching, André Hantson became an assistant at Namur University. Prof. Somers had the visionary conviction that Namur needed someone well versed in Noam Chomsky’s grammatical theories which were just beginning to make an impact in Europe – and Prof. Hantson surely proved to be the right man for the job.

Prof. Hantson’s PhD thesis looks every bit as impressive today as when it was defended at Ghent University in 1972. It gave the official start to his academic career at Namur and provided a reliable conceptual framework for much of his later research and teaching. As a teacher, Mr Hantson soon developed a reputation for the rigour and coherence of his theoretical approach, as well as for his kindness and unswerving commitment. As a researcher, he followed the constant progress in the thinking of Noam Chomsky, whose models he applied to problems in English grammar but also in the area of comparative syntax (where he has demonstrated an amazing analytical grasp of languages as wide apart as Norwegian and Russian). Incidentally, the humanitarianism and critical rationalism which distinguish Chomsky as a political thinker no less appealed to Prof. Hantson than the innovatory genius of his grammatical work.

The Academic Session organised in Prof. Hantson’s honour on the 4th May 2005 was a truly memorable event. What a resounding testimony it was to the universal respect and friendship that he had earned during his 37-year long career at the Facultés! The hustle and bustle of academic life is now replaced by the more domestic (but no less hectic, one imagines) excitement of visiting grandchildren, and in between such visits, there is at last a little more time to read books. Professor Hantson lives in Vedrin, near Namur, in the Rue Joseph Wanet 101.