Bruce Fraser

With great sorrow, we must inform the linguistics community of the passing of Bruce Fraser on April 18, 2024, after an eight-year struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. During this time, he was faithfully accompanied by his loving wife of 40 years, Dr. Polly Ulichny.

Bruce was born James Bruce Fraser in Englewood, NJ, on June 27, 1938. He attended Poughkeepsie High School in Poughkeepsie, NY and graduated from Cornell with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1961. At Cornell, he held several scholarships and was elected to Eta Kappa Nu in 1960 and Tau Beta Pi in 1962.

Bruce was in the first cohort of PhDs in the MIT Linguistics Department, graduating in 1965 with 12 others, among them Barbara Partee, Paul Kiparsky and Arnold Zwicky. His lifelong friend Haj Ross graduated two years later. During his years at MIT, Bruce was a research assistant in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and was employed by IBM (as a programmer for the IBM 7030) and by the MITRE Corporation as a staff scientist in the Information Sciences Department. During his studies, he also served as a consultant to the English Department at Florida State University. Bruce was also a First Lieutenant in the Electronic Systems Division of the US Air Force, where he worked as a Special Scientist in Linguistics.

Research

Bruce wrote prolifically on various topics in pragmatics, often laying the groundwork for others to build on. Beginning with his paper on “Idioms in a Transformational Grammar,” he published articles on politeness, hedging, doctor-patient discourse, language and arbitration and discourse/pragmatic markers (where three of his theoretical/conceptual papers from the 1990s show more than 6,000 citations). Here’s how Bruce described his research on Researchgate:

My current interest lies in the field of Discourse Markers: how they might be defined, how they differ from Pragmatic Markers, what other linguistic units contribute to utterance meaning that are not part of the sentence meaning, how we might classify Discourse Markers and organize them into types, and how do English DMs compare with those in other languages. Anyone who has any ideas, feel free to write me and I'll try to assist you.

This last sentence was the essence of Bruce Fraser, who was always ready to help and never dismissed any new idea.

Some of his work remained unpublished, e.g., his 1977 monograph “On Requesting: An Essay in Pragmatics,” in which his students were introduced to Charles Morris, Austin and Searle. Fraser positioned his work squarely on utterance meaning, arguing for a pragmatic theory where utterance meaning (M(U)) is derived from an integral of sentence (literal) meaning, Contextual factors (setting, history of the conversation, the identities and roles of the speaker and hearer and knowledge of the world) and Performance factors (rate of speech, pauses, hesitations/false starts and loudness, intensity).

An unpublished 2003 paper, “On the Conceptual-Procedural Distinction,” challenges a claim of Relevance Theory for exclusive categories, arguing that linguistic form (e.g., discourse markers/discourse connectives, some illocutionary markers, and pronouns) can express both conceptual and procedural meaning. He writes:

In this paper, I will challenge the claim put forth by RT, namely, that a linguistic form – a morpheme, a lexical item, a syntactic structure, or a stress or intonation contour – must be analyzed as having either conceptual meaning or procedural meaning, but not both. To do this, I will first show that discourse markers/discourse connectives, some illocutionary markers, and pronouns, which have been analyzed by Relevance Theorists as encoding only procedural meaning, should be analyzed as having a conceptual component of meaning. I will then show that illocutionary adverbials, which have been analyzed by Relevance Theorists as encoding only conceptual meaning, should be analyzed as having procedural meaning as well.

Bruce had warm professional relationships with a large number of scholars (among them John Searle, Diane Blakemore, Larry Selinker and others), traveling far and wide to meet with them and corresponding with them in letters prior to the onset of internet and email.

Bruce’s final project was organizing more than 2,000 pieces of humor he had collected over 30 years. “Laughing is good for you,” he used to say, and he thought there should be more of it in the world. He “worked” in his office every day and helped anyone and everyone he could.

Teaching and mentoring

Fraser’s focus on utterance meaning and illocutionary force was the focus of the dissertation research of his first three graduate students at Boston University (Ellen Rintell, Joel Walters and Susie Zimin) in the newly established doctoral program in Applied Psycholinguistics he and Paula Menyuk founded in 1972/3. His mentoring was not constrained to the classroom or conference lecture hall. At the 1977 TESOL Convention in Miami, he introduced Rintell and Walters to colleagues hiring in their institutions. Bruce considered it the responsibility of a doctoral advisor to help place his students in their first academic position. For this, we are all grateful.

Along with his wife Polly, Bruce leaves four children (Lauren, Douglas. Jeffrey and David Fraser) and their spouses Mariana Glusman, Haelan Song Fraser and Michelle Morrow), nine grandchildren and a great-granddaughter as well as in-laws, nieces, and nephews.

Beyond his family, Bruce touched many people – at Boston University, in the linguistics community, in the arbitration/mediation field, and in the world of education. Professors and mediators are usually not considered ‘helping professions’, but Bruce saw himself in these roles as a giver. One of the reasons he was so successful was that he knew how to listen.

May his memory be blessed.