Melissa Bowerman

Sonal Chitnis sonalc123 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 2 19:21:12 UTC 2011 

This is a big loss for all of us. We have lost a wonderful scholar, great
researcher in the field of study of language and cognition.
   I have read few of  articles on Spatial semantics, child language
acquisition and  cognition and language inter and intrarelative aspects ,
innate vs learned aspects of language, etc. Such an amazing  pioneer she
was! Students and researchers will always remember and thank her for her
scholarly articles, studies and work.  Her chapter on Language acquisition
and conceptual development and other on Spatial semantics is splendid work
and will definitely inspire many of researchers to work upon it.
   May her soul rest in peace.
                                                            Sonal

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Tom Roeper <roeper at linguist.umass.edu>wrote:

> Melissa Bowerman was a splendid human being and a friend of mine for 35
> years.    She delighted in the human qualities of children's utterances as
> well as their
> theoretical interest and I think that quality enabled her to explore many
> semantically demanding questions with a sense of the human being behind
> them.  We enjoyed
> many conversations at MPI and elsewhere---and her loss came too soon.
>      I hope family can cherish and nurture many inspiring memories of her.
>
> Tom Roeper
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Philip Dale <dalep at unm.edu> wrote:
>
>> ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
>>
>> Some years ago, Roger Brown introduced Melissa as “the Jane Austen of
>> psycholinguistics,” which seemed then, and now, to be wonderfully apt. Her
>> gift was to show how some wonderfully observed details of language
>> acquisition could teach us major lessons about both the phenomena and the
>> explanation of language acquisition. More than that, she did it all with
>> exquisite clarity, wit, and grace.  A great scholar and friend.****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> Philip S. Dale, Professor and Chair****
>>
>> Speech & Hearing Sciences****
>>
>> ****University** of **New Mexico********
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> 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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>
>
>
> --
> Tom Roeper
> Dept of Lingiustics
> UMass South College
> Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
> 413 256 0390
>
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-- 
Ms Sonal V Chitnis
Lecturer In Speech Language Pathology
Bharati Vidyapeeth University School of Audiology & Speech Language
Pathology,
4th Floor, Homeopathy Hospital building,
Katraj-Dhankawadi,
Pune- 411043.
Tel: 020 24377417

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