Erica Garcia, 1934-2009

[Ellen Contini-Morava]

[With apologies for cross-posting]

	We grieve to announce the passing of Erica C. García, in Leiden, the
Netherlands, of cardiac arrest in the early hours of July 5, 2009. She
had returned to Holland from Italy (her home since her retirement from
Leiden University) to do research in the university library. She had
just finished correcting the final proofs of what must be regarded as
the magnum opus of her 40-year-long linguistic career, her 300-page
book entitled /The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: Cognitive
Constraints on Spanish Clitic Clustering/ (John Benjamins, in press).
The theoretical point of the book, and the theme of many if not most
of her numerous articles on many topics, is that the only
arbitrariness in Language is that of the linguistic sign, and that
phenomena which others have treated as products of an arbitrary syntax
(as in various versions of generative grammar and other formal schools
of linguistics) are more profitably regarded as the product of the
meaning of the sign or signs in question and the non-arbitrary
interpretive or compositional routines motivated by those meanings.
There is, in other words, no "machinery for machinery's sake" in
Language. As she states in the conclusion of her forthcoming book:

	"Language is, fundamentally, a phenomenon of the "third type"..., i.e. an 
  unintended human-social product, shaped in invisible-hand fashion 
  through and in its actual performance... "Competence" and "performance" 
  can thus hardly be kept apart, for they coexist in the same mind, and 
  one's own and others' performance can always be (re)interpreted as 
  evidence of what the "language" itself is like.
	This indeterminacy is truly fundamental, for syntactic versatility is 
  inexorably required by the unpredictability of language users' 
  communicative needs, whose vagaries constantly require improvised - and 
  hence iconic - syn-tactic expression. Communicative openness and 
  versatility have a cost, ie the cognitive effort required by 
  com-position, in both production and interpretation.
	Cognitively economical solutions of communicative problems can be 
  expected to enjoy a quantitative edge in use: that favours their 
  rote-recall, and may eventually result in re-analysis of a con-struct as 
  a structurally "arbitrary" unit. As often pointed out, grammatical 
  change is a one-way street from iconic com-position, where calculus 
  plays a dominant role, to the simple retrieval of an arbitrary symbol... 
  The critical shift presumably takes place when the retrieval of an 
  (unanalyzed complex) item proves cognitively more economic than actual 
  calculus of the sequence..., but the cognitive cost of competing 
  alternatives cannot be gauged without some idea of what synchronically 
  motivates the choice of one as against another communicative alternative."


 	Erica García received her Ph.D. from the Columbia University
Department of Linguistics in 1964, during what has been called that
Department's "Golden Age", with such scholars as Robert Austerlitz,
William Diver, Marvin Herzog, William Labov, John Lotz, and Uriel
Weinreich. In the early years, she was associated with the approach to
linguistics originated by Diver and which has since come to be known
as the "Columbia School;" cf. Contini-Morava and Sussman Goldberg
(1995) and Davis, Gorup, and Stern (2006). Her first book-length
attempt to deal with Spanish clitic pronouns, /The Role of Theory in
Linguistic Analysis/ (1975), dates from this period. After leaving
Columbia in 1972, she taught briefly in the Interdepartmental
Linguistics Program at Lehman College of the City University of New
York, then moved to Leiden University, where she became Associate
Professor (1979) and Professor (1992) in the Department of Languages
and Cultures of Latin America. She retired in 1999. She was also a
member of the editorial board of Lingua from 1983 to 1996.


  	Brilliant, fierce, intolerant of intellectual dishonesty and
incompetence, Erica refused to play the non-threatening, secondary
role which women were expected to play in academe in the 1970s. Those
who studied with her or who asked her for critical comments on their
manuscripts discovered that she was unrelentingly thorough in matters
of both theory and data, uncovering every weakness in fact and
argumentation, no matter what language was the topic. There was many a
chuckle over Geoff Nunberg's cartoon of her roasting a hapless seminar
participant in a cauldron, captioned "The Inhuman Factor". However, no
matter how unpleasant it might have been to endure the roasting, the
result was always a great improvement over the earlier draft. Those
students at Columbia or CUNY who learned to do linguistics by writing
Master's Essays or dissertations under her guidance learned full well
what she meant when she would comment on the perceived slovenly work
of some linguist giving a talk that "The trouble with Linguist X is
that s/he has never written a Master's Essay."

	A complete bibliography of Erica García's work must await publication 
of a much more complete obituary than this brief notice could be. Her 
interests ranged from the history of English to psycholinguistics to 
many aspects of Spanish grammar. She published in such varied 
collections as Discourse and Syntax (1979), Discourse Perspectives 
on Syntax (1981), New Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation 
(1991), Studies in Language Variation (1977), and Studies in Romance 
Linguistics (1986). Her articles also appeared in such journals as 
Folia Linguistica, /The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research/, /Lexis/, 
/Lenguaje en Context/, /Lingua/, /Linguistics/, /Linguistische Berichte/, and 
Neuphilologische /Mitteilungen/.

References:

Contini-Morava, Ellen and Barbara Sussman Goldberg (eds.) 1995. /Meaning 
as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory/. Berlin and New 
York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Davis, Joseph; Radmila J. Gorup and Nancy Stern. (eds.) 2006. /Advances 
in Functional Linguistics: Columbia School beyond its origins/. 
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

García, Erica. 1975. /The Role of Theory in Linguistic Analysis: the 
Spanish pronoun system./ Amsterdam: North Holland.

(in press). /The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: cognitive 
constraints on Spanish clitic clustering/. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

***************************************
Robert S. Kirsner 
Department of Germanic Languages 
212 Royce Hall - UCLA 
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1539 USA 

Ellen Contini-Morava
Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4120 USA