Melissa Bowerman

Thu Nov 3 16:02:51 UTC 2011

Yes, Melissa was truly a rare intellectual and a genuine and generous
person.  I am proud to have been blessed to have had her as mentor and
friend.

She will be sorely missed.  But her influence will remain pervasive and
longstanding in the field.

I wish I could join the memorial at BU tomorrow, but my thoughts will
definitely be with you all.

Ginny Gathercole

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:09 AM, <koc at boun.edu.tr> wrote:

> 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
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to <mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> > info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > <mailto:info-childes%2Bunsubscribe at googlegroups.com>
> >
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com<mailto:
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > <http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en>
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > 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<tel:732-932-7496> ex. 8310
> > FAX: 732932-6829<tel:732932-6829>
> >
> > Web Page: <http://www.gse.rutgers.edu/>
> > www.gse.rutgers.edu<http://www.gse.rutgers.edu>
> > <http://www.gse.rutgers.edu/>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to <mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> > info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > <mailto:info-childes%2Bunsubscribe at googlegroups.com>
> >
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com<mailto:
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > <http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en>
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to <mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> > info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > <mailto:info-childes%2Bunsubscribe at googlegroups.com>
> >
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com<mailto:
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > <http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en>
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Tom Roeper
> > Dept of Lingiustics
> > UMass South College
> > Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
> > 413 256 0390
> >
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to <mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> > info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > <mailto:info-childes%2Bunsubscribe at googlegroups.com>
> >
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com<mailto:
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > <http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en>
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > 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
> >
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to
> > info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> >
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com<mailto:
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com>.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "Info-CHILDES" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Info-CHILDES" group.
> To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
>
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20111103/fe923f76/attachment.htm>