Language Log

Posted by MIT Linguistics:

Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as "Haj Ross", his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many — one might even say "most" — of the core research topics under central investigation today.

Prof. Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 has passed away today at the age of 89. His groundbreaking work on ancient Chinese scripts has significantly shaped the study of Chinese palaeography and grapholinguistics. A monumental loss for academia. https://t.co/Jn0aLn19kI pic.twitter.com/OmHxTgAqbz

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) May 8, 2025

John Cotter, "David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89", NYT 1/3/2025:

David Lodge, the erudite author of academic comedy and a wide-ranging literary critic, died on Wednesday in Birmingham, England. He was 89. […]

The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages.

The Booker Prize non-winning was featured in headlines from the AP ("British author David Lodge, twice nominated for Booker Prize, dies at 89") and the Independent ("Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Lodge dies at the age of 89"), and mentioned prominently in several other obits — so I want to give  Lodge the last word on this topic, via his 2018 interview in The Times, which ran under the headline "David Lodge: ‘The Booker prize is good for the novel but bad for novelists’":

“The Booker prize has created a huge long line of losers, as Mr Trump would probably call them, and there are enough chances to fail in the literary world without going through that.”

David Lodge is one of the prize’s most notable unwinners. At the age of 82 this former professor of English literature, with 15 novels to his name, is probably the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it. Not that failure ought to bother him. It has been a nice little earner. He has mined the great seams of frustrated ambition, bungled relationships and sexual disappointment to create superb social comedy in novels such as Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988).

And I should mention that The Booker Prizes's web page for David Lodge, along with listing his three failures to win, features the fact that he chaired the prize committee in 1989.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth issue: “Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024),” by Lothar von Falkenhausen.

Next year  E. J. Brill will publish a book by the little-known but highly accomplished Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, in which he pioneers a novel, anthropological interpretation of the Chinese classics. The book demonstrates how certain motifs and images in the Yijing (Classic of Changes), the Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and the Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) are strategically deployed as structuring elements so as to meld these texts into a semantic continuum. Unfortunately, the author passed away this fall without being able to see his book in print; this obituary aims to make him and his life’s work better known to the scholarly community.

Ximena Conde, "William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97", Philadelphia Inquirer 12/23/2024:

William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics who spent decades recording how Philadelphians talk, calling the city the “gold standard” for studying language patterns, died Tuesday, Dec. 17, in his Washington Square home at the age of 97. He died of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn.

The whole obituary is well worth reading.

William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.

Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation.

It is with deep sadness that I report the passing on October 14, 2023 of Tsu-Lin Mei, professor of Chinese historical linguistics at Cornell University.  Tsu-Lin was born on February 14, 1933 at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1954, his M.A. (in Mathematics) from Harvard in 1955, and his Ph.D. (in Philosophy) from Yale in 1962. He joined Cornell in 1971 as Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, chaired the Department of Asian Studies, directed the China-Japan Program (the East Asia Program), and was the Hu Shih Professor from 1994 to his retirement in 2001.  After retiring from Cornell, he served as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, National Taiwan University, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, among others.

He was elected to Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1994.

From the Princeton University Department of East Asian Studies newsletter (3/26/23):

Passing of Emeritus lecturer Hai-t’ao Tang

Emeritus lecturer, Hai-t’ao Tang passed away at his Princeton home on Sunday, March 26, 2023. He was born August 27, 1931, in Shanghai, China and completed his master’s degree in Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University. He joined the East Asian Studies Department as a Lecturer in Chinese language in 1974 and taught for 22 years, becoming Lecturer Emeritus in 1996.

Hai-t’ao Tang was recruited to teach at Princeton by Professors Frederick (Fritz) Mote and Ta-tuan (T.T.) Ch’en. Throughout his career he devoted his energy and intellect to teaching Chinese as a living language and encouraged each learner to adopt Chinese as one’s own language and nurture it to live and grow inside oneself. Hai -t'ao Tang co-authored nearly a dozen books including Classical Chinese — A Basic Reader and Readings in Classical Chinese Poetry and Prose.

He is survived by his wife Nai-Ying Yuan Tang who also spent her career in the Department of East Asian Studies as Chinese Language Lecturer.

(source)

Xú Wénkān 徐文堪, who was born in October of 1943 in the metropolis of Shanghai, died in the same city on January 4, 2023 of complications arising from the novel coronavirus.  He was one of the leading lexicographers compiling and editing the Hànyǔ Dà Cídiǎn 漢語大詞典 (Unabridged Dictionary of Sinitic), a comprehensive work of 23,000 head characters, 370,000 words, and 1,500,000 citations in 12 large volumes plus index, in the editing of which Wenkan played a key role from its beginning in 1977 to its completion in 1994.

The following is a guest post by Martin Ho Kwan Ip,  who is now a postdoc at Penn. See "Anne Cutler 1945-2022", 6/8/2022, for some background and links.

I am one of Anne's most recent students (her 44th student from the MARCS Institute in Australia). I met Anne for the first time in 2014 when she was invited to give a talk at the University of Queensland (we had been corresponding by email but had never met until then). Although I was fascinated with languages, I was still an undergraduate student in psychology and foreign languages; I knew next to nothing about speech and was totally unfamiliar with many of the concepts and jargon in linguistics. But her talk was like a story and it was so memorable – she showed us some of the different mental challenges associated with listening (like when she used speech waveforms to show us how gaps between words are not as clear as we think), why different languages are needed to better understand how the mind works when we listen, how infants’ early segmentation abilities influence later vocabulary growth – this was the first language-related talk I had attended and I was just so, so intrigued. 

Anne Cutler, our beloved colleague, recently became ill with an opportunistic lung infection shortly after traveling to London for her official induction as a 2020 Fellow of the British Academy. From there she traveled to Nijmegen, where on May 31st she received medical treatment that revealed an underlying leukemia. After just one week in the hospital, with her husband, Bill Sloman, by her side, she died on June 7th. We thank Bill for keeping us apprised of Anne’s condition.

So many of us have vivid and delightful memories of Anne. They are welcome in the comments below, or will be included in posts to follow.

Here is a link to an obituary on the website of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where Anne was director from 1993 to 2013.

Update 6/12/2022 —

• An obituary at Western Sydney University, home of the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, where Anne was Distinguished Professor.
• Anne in a group picture of the Arc Centre of Excellence for The Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), a project she conceived in collaboration with Jane Simpson and Jill Wigglesworth in 2013.
• A 2018 interview with Anne on the CoEDL website.
• A remembrance, with a photo of younger Anne, by the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the UK Medical Research Council, Cambridge, England.

Condolences may be sent to Anne’s husband, Bill Sloman: Anthony William Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>.

Update — "In Memoriam Anne Cutler" ISCApad 8/6/2022.

Update — "Spoken language expert's exuberant life of science" Sydney Morning Herald 9/23/22

Update — "A Remembrance of Anne Cutler", 7/13/2022.

Terrence Scott Kaufman was born on June 12, 1937, in Portland, Oregon, and died on March 3, 2022. He earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1959, began his decades-long fieldwork career in 1960, and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1963 at the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation was a grammar of Tzeltal. He taught at The Ohio State University (1963-1964) and at Berkeley (1964-1970), and then spent the rest of his teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh (1971-2011). He was a valued mentor to the many students he trained at Pitt and in his MesoAmerican documentation projects, and a dear friend to many of the rest of us. As his old friend Lyle Campbell put it recently, Terry was truly "astonishing in the breadth and depth of his knowledge of seemingly everything, of his seemingly superhuman ability as a fieldworker, picking up instantly on the most subtle of things, getting more documentation done in a week's fieldwork on a language than most others could achieve in years of effort".

I learned about Martin Kay's recent passing from a brief obit on the ACL's web site — Tim Baldwin, "Vale Martin Kay":

It is with a profound sense of loss that, on behalf of the ACL Exec, I announce the passing of Martin Kay on August 7, 2021.

Martin was a pioneer and visionary of computational linguistics, in the truest sense of those terms. He made seminal contributions to the field in areas including parsing, unification grammars, finite state methods, and machine translation.

Martin was educated at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the USA and working at Rand Corporation from 1961 to 1972. He was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at University of California Irvine from 1972 to 1974, before moving to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1985, he took up a position as Professor at Stanford University, and split his time between Xerox PARC and Stanford until 2002.

Martin was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and was Chair of the International Committee for Computational Linguistics from 1984 to 2016. But perhaps equally for those who had the good fortune of knowing him personally or attending an event that he spoke at, he was a warm, generous, extraordinarily funny, disarmingly down-to-earth man whose loss is felt keenly.