26.4188, All: Obituary: Jonathan Fine (1949-2015)

Tue Sep 22 19:34:40 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4188. Tue Sep 22 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4188, All: Obituary: Jonathan Fine (1949-2015)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
              http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 15:32:10
From: Susan Rothstein [Susan.Rothstein at biu.ac.il]
Subject: Obituary: Jonathan Fine (1949-2015)

With great sorrow we must inform the linguistics community of the untimely death of our colleague and friend Jonathan Hartley Fine ז"ל , professor of linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, who passed away on September 10, 2015 at Shaarey Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem after a short and sudden illness. He had lived in Jerusalem for the past 35 years.

Jonathan was born April 18, 1949 in Toronto where he attended Glendon College, graduating with a B.A. in English and political science in 1971 and an MA in English. There, he was introduced to systemic functional linguistics and mentored by Michael Gregory. He also completed an MA in English at York University. He pursued linguistics and systemics at Cornell where he studied with Charles Hockett, but he also spoke warmly about Joe Grimes, Sally McConnell-Ginet and Linda Waugh.  Beyond the demographics, Jonathan’s preparation at Glendon and York in literature and political philosophy stimulated his broad interests.  This wide intellectual scope took him to systemic functional linguistics, child language and second language discourse studies and the neurolinguistics of psychiatric disorders, among many other places in and beyond linguistics.  He consulted and collaborated with Michael Cole and Bill Hall at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at Rockefeller, with Carl Bereit
 er at OISE and with Roy Freedle at ETS. He knew his way around Departments of Psychiatry, working at Rutgers Medical School and McMaster Psychiatric  Institute, and he eventually developed a long-standing collaboration with Peter Bartolucci and Rosemary Tannock at The Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto. 

Jonathan’s research focussed on text analysis and in particular on the analysis of transcripts of doctor/patient interactions as an entry to the interface of language and psychiatry, publishing extensively and showing a keen awareness of the fuzzy boundaries between psychiatry and neurology. He gradually developed a theoretical model for the analysis of psychatrist/patient interaction, culminating in his book, Language in Psychiatry: A Handbook for Clinical Practice  (Fine, J. 2006. London: Equinox). This book, for psychiatrists, emphasized the crucial importance of linguistically educated listening, and is testimony to what made Jonathan such a special person. As well as stressing the need for professionalism and high academic standards, it expresses his belief in the importance of individuals and of listening to them, and his conviction that top quality academic research could and should interact with the world outside the university and impact positively on people’s lives. In 
 other words, besides being the fruit of many years of research, it was an expression of his essential humanism. 

Jonathan came to the English Department at Bar-Ilan in 1982 as the third linguist in a fledgling linguistics program which he helped mentor to a level of 10 senior faculty members and several dozen graduate students, with a mission to provide strong theoretical foundations for research on a range of theoretical and applied problems. He never liked the distinction between theoretical and applied linguistics, and sought to make sure that all students had a good basic general linguistics education, no matter where they ended up specialising. Jonathan coordinated the Linguistics section at Bar-Ilan, chaired the English Literature and Linguistics Department and was involved, in recent years, in the development of the new program for Linguistics in Clinical Research. Outside the department, he saw his main contribution to the university in his membership on two of the University’s key committees, “Appointments and Promotions” and the committee which established the Graduate College a
 nd keeps a close eye on the quality of PhDs and MAs. He was tight-lipped about everything in those committees, only a small part of his impeccable integrity. 

Jonathan loved to teach. He prepared every lecture¸ even those he had given many times before, from content to organization and back to content. He looked forward to the out-of-the-box reaction and relished the discussion which followed. But as much of, or maybe more than, a teacher, Jonathan was a mentor. He advised two dozen graduate theses, each one individually tailored to the student’s interests and his own expertises. Many of these focused on language and psychiatry (schizophrenia, autism, ADHD, Tourettes, depression and hepatic encephalopathy). His teaching and mentoring drew from an amazing library of recordings, transcripts and lecture notes as well as what he took from tireless searches and reading of current work, from philosophy and neuroscience to cognitive and neuro-psychology and beyond. 

Jonathan had a rich life outside academia. His home was full of classical music, refurbished furniture and the smells of his vegetarian cooking, but most of all it was filled with the many personal attributes which have made the world a better place. His home was always open -- for sleeping, eating, studying, and shmoozing. No guest ever made a bed, cooked a meal, did a dish. It was effortless for him. He was a gifted friend, and each one of us, colleagues, students and friends, has a personal story of how Jonathan helped or took care of us when we needed it, never mentioning it again after the event. He organized minyanim (private prayer services) for mourners in his neighborhood, tailoring them to the needs and times of the mourning family, and providing help in many different ways. As one of his daughters said at the funeral, her father gave “with no expectation to get in return.” Jonathan loved his children and grandchildren and was proud of them in ways his modesty never let
  him express.

Those who knew him will always remember him as a great humanist, a most knowledgeable yet modest person who radiated generosity and kindness in his interaction with colleagues and students.  

זכרו ברוך יהי  May his memory be blessed.

Susan Rothstein and Joel Walters, Bar-Ilan University

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4188	
----------------------------------------------------------