Eugenio
Coseriu
1921-2002
Eugenio Coseriu died 7 September 2002 at the age of 81 in Tübingen, Germany. He was one of the most important linguists of the 20th century; many of his works are classics, and his basic linguistic concepts belong to the fundamental knowledge of linguistics and language philosophy and have had influence far beyond these disciplines. His best known publications of the 1950s, e.g. Sistema, norma y habla (1952), Determinación y entorno (1957), or Sincronía, diacronía e historia (1958), all published first in Spanish in Montevideo, Uruguay, offer a critical reception of Saussure's thought and the structuralist method, which he applies to all linguistic fields while always searching to demonstrate not only its validity, but also its limits. He postulates what he calls 'integral linguistics', a complete linguistic theory that integrates structuralism but limits the relevance of structures to some particular aspects of language. His basic conceptions go back to Aristotle, Hegel, and above all to Humboldt's consideration of language as enérgeia, as the speaker's creative activity. His theoretical linguistic framework allowed Coseriu to contribute important work to a wide range of subjects, e.g. semantics, syntax, translation theory, variational linguistics, text linguistics, historical linguistics, and the history of linguistics as a discipline. An immense theoretical and an impressive, in many cases native-like, knowledge of all the Romance languages, Latin and Greek, the Slavic languages, the Germanic languages and several other languages such as Japanese allowed him to offer new insights into functional aspects of these languages--above all the Romance languages--and to discover and demonstrate by strong empirical evidence many structural and typological characteristics. He was awarded more than 40 titles of Doctor h.c. and honorific titles by many academies and institutions, among others the Linguistic Society of America (Honorary Member), the Linguistic Circle of New York, and the Société de Linguistique Romane. Coseriu was born in 1921 in Romania and studied linguistics and philosophy in Romania and in Rome. After leaving Romania in 1940, where his poems and short stories were considered examples of a new and promising talent for literature, he worked in Italy as a translator and art critic and wrote a thesis in philosophy and another one in Romance philology. In 1951, he went to Montevideo, Uruguay, where some of his most important work was published (some of his work from this period, such as a large monograph on the theory of proper names, is still unpublished). In 1963, after appointments at several European universities, he accepted the chair of Romance linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where he lived and worked until his death. The Tübingen School of Linguistics has had and continues to have a strong influence in European Romance linguistics, but also overseas, especially in Latin America and Japan. (Johannes Kabatek, U Freiburg, Germany)
W. Nelson Francis
1911-2002
W. Nelson Francis died 14 June 2002 at home in Providence, RI, at the age of 91. A prominent linguist, he is especially known for his seminal contributions particularly in the fields of dialectology and computational corpus linguistics. He received his undergraduate degree in literature at Harvard U and his PhD at Penn. He taught at Franklin and Marshall C (Lancaster, PA) before coming to the Department of Linguistics at Brown University in 1962. Nelson was the co-creator--with Henry Kucera--of the Brown Corpus. This pioneering work was instrumental in the development of the field of corpus linguistics, and it has had a profound impact on research directions and techniques in computational linguistics. It has also become a standard source for experimental work on language. His areas of expertise also included the history and structure of English, and dialectology. He authored five books, including The structure of American English, The English language: An introduction, and Dialectology: An introduction. Nelson was instrumental in building linguistics at Brown and chaired the Department of Linguistics from 1968 until he 'retired' in 1975. Not one to really retire, he continued to teach historical linguistics until the early 1990s and even returned to active duty as Chair of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences in 1987. He remained an active and vibrant member of the department until just a few years ago. He was the consummate gentleman scholar, with a wide range of interests. He was an avid sailor, a member of Save the Bay, the NAACP, the Urban League of Rhode Island, and president of the Providence Shakespearean Society. He is survived by his wife Nearlene, two sons, a daughter, and two grandchildren. (Pauline Jacobson, Brown U)
Kathleen Fenton
1921-2002
Kathleen M. Fenton, a linguistics expert, died in Malden, MA, on 12 September 2002. She was 81. A native of Malden, Ms Fenton graduated from Girls' Catholic High School in Malden. She received a full scholarship to Emmanuel College, graduated magna cum laude in 1943, and worked at the National Security Agency in Washington, DC, during World War II. The agency sent her to UC-Berkeley, where she received her master's degree in languages. After leaving the NSA, she worked as office manager for the Catholic Information Center in Washington for several years before taking a position at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. While she was there, Dr. Thomas A. Sebeok asked her to work at his Research Center for the Language Sciences at IN U, where she became editor of the journal Language Sciences. She returned to Malden in 1977 and became a proofreader at G. K. Hall Publishers in Boston. At the same time, she was asked to proofread Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. She received the second Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for distinguished service to the society. Ms. Fenton leaves no immediate family.