Melissa Bowerman

Thu Nov 3 09:09:12 UTC 2011

I am also very saddened at Melissa's loss. Her work has been one of the most
inspiring sourcesfor many of us in the field. I feel priviledged to have known
her warm and generous person.

Ayhan Aksu-Koc
Bogazici University

 Quoting Maryann Romski <mromski at gsu.edu>:

> 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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> 
> --
> Lorraine McCune, EdD
> Chair, Department of Educational Psychology
> Graduate School of Education
> Rutgers University
> 10 Seminary Place
> New Brunswick, NJ 08901
> 
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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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