Melissa Bowerman

[Lorraine McCune]

I would like to join with others in mourning this loss. Melissa Bowerman's
brilliant work was always an inspiration.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:

> Dear friends and colleagues,
>
> It’s with great personal sadness that I announce the death of Melissa
> Bowerman, on 31 October 2011, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
>
> For the past forty years Melissa Bowerman has been a central force in the
> field of child language development, contributing influential data and
> theory on the relations between language and cognition in both children and
> adults. She was one of the first to look closely at what children’s errors
> could reveal about semantic development and published classic studies of
> her own children’s causative verbs and prepositional choices in locative
> constructions. What she discovered from her analyses was that children
> extract systematic but quite abstract patterns in the semantic structure of
> the language being acquired. Moreover, some errors emerge rather late,
> after a period of apparently correct usage. This strongly suggested that
> children don’t come to language with ready-made meanings to attach to
> word-forms. Rather, they have to discover those patterns first and then put
> them to use.
>
> Bowerman was always interdisciplinary in her work: she drew on findings
> from developmental psychology, cognitive and linguistic anthropology, and
> linguistics. She was a pioneer in the use of experimental and ethnographic
> data, across a range of languages, as she examined how language shapes both
> cognitive and linguistic development in the young child, and how different
> languages subtly influence adult categorization of such spatial relations
> as containment and support.
>
> She was an innovator in the methods she used in her research, using
> correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling to analyze data as she
> explored the conceptual bases of semantic categories. She made especially
> important contributions in her research on spatial cognition and language,
> linguistic argument structure, event representation, and children’s
> emerging linguistic expressions of causality. On the theoretical side, she
> always sought to disentangle what might be innate from what could be
> learned in first language acquisition, and her insights as well as her
> findings cast new light on typology, language universals, and human
> cognition. Throughout her life, she focussed on how individual languages
> could have particular effects on the course and content of language
> development, and what the implications were for adult mental life.
>
> Melissa Bowerman had a perpetually inquiring mind, and was fascinated by
> all kinds of domains –– from birds, plants, knots, and dreams to her flute
> music. She would always find a new angle on the domain under discussion and
> pursue it with curiosity and interest, so lunchtimes at the Max-Planck-
> Institute of Psycholinguistics where she spent most of her professional
> life, were a constant source of enjoyment for whoever was there. She was
> modest, generous, lucid, and always scholarly in her approach.
>
> She is survived by her husband Wijbrandt van Schuur, her three
> daughters––Christy, Eva, and Claartje––and four grandchildren.
>
> Eve V. Clark
> Stanford University
> President, International Association for the Study of Child Language
>
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-- 
Lorraine McCune, EdD
Chair, Department of Educational Psychology
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers University
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Ph: 732-932-7496 ex. 8310
FAX: 732932-6829

Web Page: www.gse.rutgers.edu
 <http://www.gse.rutgers.edu/>

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