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<br>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<br>
many conversations at MPI and elsewhere---and her loss came too soon.<br> I hope family can cherish and nurture many inspiring memories of her.<br><br>Tom Roeper<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Philip Dale <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dalep@unm.edu">dalep@unm.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;"><u></u> <u></u></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">Philip S. Dale, Professor and Chair<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">Speech & Hearing Sciences<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u><u></u><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">University</span></font><u></u><font color="navy"><span style="color: navy;"> of <u></u>New Mexico<u></u></span></font><u></u><font color="navy"><span style="color: navy;"><u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="navy" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: navy;">O</span></font>n Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 12:44
PM, Brian MacWhinney <<a href="mailto:macw@cmu.edu" target="_blank">macw@cmu.edu</a>>
wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Dear friends and colleagues,<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It’s with great personal sadness that I announce the death of
Melissa Bowerman, on 31 October 2011, in <u></u><u></u>Nijmegen<u></u><u></u>,
The Netherlands.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">She is survived by her husband Wijbrandt van Schuur, her three
daughters––Christy, Eva, and Claartje––and four
grandchildren.<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-left: 0in;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Eve V. Clark<br>
<u></u><u></u>Stanford<u></u> <u></u>University<u></u><u></u><br>
President, International Association for the Study of Child Language<u></u><u></u></span></font></p>
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<u></u><u></u>Graduate<u></u> <u></u>School<u></u><u></u> of Education<br>
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