Akio Kamio

[Matt Shibatani]

To members of Funknet:

    We are deeply sorry that we must confirm the information that several
members of our community had read in the news: A funknet member has been
officially notified by Kyoko Suzuki of Dokkyo University in Japan that
Prof. Akio Kamio and his wife Noriko committed suicide Sunday. He had been
suffering from depression for a long while.
    Prof. Kamio was noted for his ability to work productively in both
functional and formal frameworks, and on both normal and aphasic language.
He was among the leading senior linguists in Japan with numerous important
roles in that linguistic community, including a member of the editorial
board of Gengo Kenkyu, the journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan.
Being kind-hearted and considerate,  Akio also had a large circle of
friends in the U.S., having been a visiting scholar at Harvard and at the
University of Colorado. His books include Territory of Information (1997),
and the edited/co-edited volumes Function and Structure (1998, festschrift
for Susumu Kuno) and Directions in Functional Linguistics (1997), all
published by John Benjamins.

Lise Menn, Brian MacWhinney, Matt Shibatani