Melissa Bowerman

Thu Nov 3 02:03:08 UTC 2011

Melissa was also a wonderful teacher and mentor.  I had the privilege of taking a language acquisition course from her when she was at the University of Kansas early in her career. She was generous with her time and taught us so much through her semantic examples from Christy and Eva.  Her passing is a great loss for the field. MaryAnn

Sent from MAR'S IPAD

On Nov 2, 2011, at 3:21 PM, "Sonal Chitnis" <sonalc123 at gmail.com<mailto:sonalc123 at gmail.com>> wrote:

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 <<mailto:roeper at linguist.umass.edu>roeper at linguist.umass.edu<mailto: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 <<mailto:dalep at unm.edu>dalep at unm.edu<mailto: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 <<mailto:macw at cmu.edu>macw at cmu.edu<mailto: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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UMass South College
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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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