30.3134, All: Obituary: Susan Rothstein (1958-2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3134. Thu Aug 15 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3134, All: Obituary: Susan Rothstein (1958-2019)

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Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2019 01:48:23
From: Gabi Danon [Gabi.Danon at biu.ac.il]
Subject: Obituary: Susan Rothstein (1958-2019)

 
With deep pain and sorrow we mourn the untimely passing of our colleague,
mentor and friend Susan Devorah Rothstein ז''ל, Professor of Theoretical
Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, who passed away on July 30, 2019
in Tel Aviv after a short and sudden illness.

Susan was born on August 20, 1958 in Middlesex Hospital in London and married
to Fred Landman in a civil ceremony in Ithaca on 28 July 1994 and in a Jewish
ceremony with hupa and kiddushin on 6 October 1994 (Rosh Hodesh Cheshvan).

Susan earned her Bachelor's degree with Honors in 1979 from the School of
Philosophy and Modern Languages at Oxford University. She went on to MIT,
where she studied Linguistics and Philosophy, completing a dissertation in
1983 on ''The Syntactic Forms of Predication'' which was published by the
Indiana Linguistics Club.

Susan joined the Bar-Ilan University faculty as an Allon Fellow in 1985
following two years as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the College of
William and Mary (US). At Bar-Ilan she was Professor of Theoretical
Linguistics and a Fellow in the Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain
Research Center. She served two terms on the University Promotions and
Appointments Committee, twice as Chair of the Department of English Literature
and Linguistics, and from 2014-15 was the University Commissioner for the
Prevention of Sexual Harassment. She was instrumental in establishing the MA
program in Creative Writing in the department and supportive of
cross-disciplinary research throughout the university.

Outside of Israel, Susan was a visiting scholar and lecturer in Brazil, the
Netherlands (Leiden), the US (Cornell) and France (Université de Paris). She
was awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award (Humboldt-Forschungspreis)
from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2016 for her work in formal
semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. At the awards ceremony she was
invited to give one of the four keynote lectures to an audience of top
scientists across all disciplines. Her lecture on crosslinguistic aspects of
counting and measuring was enthusiastically received.

During her stay at the University of Tübingen, she pursued a number of
projects in collaboration and/or ''sparring partner competition'' with her
husband Professor Fred Landman of Tel Aviv University, in particular on the
notion of incrementality and maximality in aspectual semantics, and on the
notion of ''countable portions'' in the semantics of mass/count nouns and
measure phrases. In their own words: ''We were incredibly happy that we could
collaborate so easily and be each other's muse for our individual projects.''

In the past twenty years or so, Susan shaped the debates on aspect and the
mass/count distinction. Her theories were couched in an algebraic
(mereological) framework. Her 2004 book entitled Structuring Events - A Study
in the Semantics of Lexical Aspect (Blackwell Publishing) has now become a
classic textbook in this domain. Her main thesis is that aspectual classes are
not generalizations over verb meanings, as commonly assumed since Vendler and
Dowty; rather, they constitute a set of constraints on how the grammar allows
us to individuate events. Regarding the mass/count distinction, the issues of
individuation play a central role for Susan's work in this domain as well. Her
findings have appeared regularly in numerous publications, but her most recent
thinking on this topic is best reflected in Semantics for Counting and
Measuring (2017, Cambridge University Press). While all agree that context is
central to grounding the semantics for the mass/count distinction, one of
Susan’s key innovations consists in arguing that the ‘counting context’
dependency should be built directly into the lexical meaning of count nouns.
She motivates their grammatical count behavior by proposing that their
denotation is indexed to counting contexts which determine what is ‘one’
entity in their denotation, as it cannot be a formal atom in their
mereologically structured domain or a natural unit associated with a natural
kind. The notion of context employed by Susan is one which specifies what is
lexically accessible for counting in context. Susan enjoyed a wide recognition
for her work on the mass/count distinction, also thanks to its wide
cross-linguistic reach (English, Hebrew, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese,
Chinese, inter alia). Besides her dissertation, Susan authored three books
(Predicates and their Subjects, Kluwer 2001; Structuring Events: A Study in
the Semantics of Lexical Aspect, Blackwell 2004; and Semantics for Counting
and Measuring, Cambridge 2016); she edited four others, and published dozens
of papers in the best journals in linguistics. Her work benefited from
collaborations with many colleagues and students. She published many
collaborative papers with her students, and in recent years, on different
projects with Hana Filip, Fred Landman, Suzi Lima, Adina Moshavi, Roberta
Pires de Oliveira and Alessandro Treves.

She believed that better theories of language would come from the interaction
between theoretical scholars with a crosslinguistic perspective and a large
supply of formal techniques (like herself) and scholars who may be less formal
but have deep access to wider ranges of subtle linguistic data. Susan put this
conviction at work in many ways, advising and collaborating on work in
Chinese, Hungarian, Brazilian languages, as well as Hebrew and English. 

She was very proud of her recent work with Professor Suzi Lima from Toronto
University, whom she collaborated with on the project ''a typological study of
the count/mass distinction in Brazilian languages'' Together, they designed a
questionnaire on the mass/count distinction and counting and measuring that a
large number of specialists took on fieldwork trips to the respective
languages in the Amazon area they were studying. The results have already been
presented at a conference and will be published in a special issue of
Linguistic Variation. Susan's most recent paper, which will appear in a volume
on the mass/count distinction edited by Jeffry Pelletier, puts some of the
fascinating results into a theoretic context. The conclusions that she draws
are likely to shape the debate on these issues for some time to come.

Susan has also been engaged, among her many other endeavors, in collaborative
research on Biblical Hebrew construct phrases and numerical expressions,
combining the formal semantic and the philological approach to language study.
She was instrumental in 2017, along with the late Prof. Edit Doron of Hebrew
University and Prof. Outi Bat-El of Tel Aviv University, in founding the
Biblical Hebrew Linguistics and Philology Network, with the goal of providing
a space in which theoretical linguists and biblical philologists can meet to
explore mutual research interests. The Network has already held successful
workshops in Israel and Canada.

To her students and colleagues, Susan was a true mentor, who was present in
good and bad moments, and always had a word of encouragement.  She was not
just a figure who commanded respect, but also a person of enormous generosity
- a rarely found combination. She was an expert in managing pedagogy and
administration, but more than anything she provided an ethical compass for the
Department of English Literature and Linguistics.  She was always ready to
help a student or colleague,  and when required she fought with tenacity for
the causes she knew to be just - however small or large. In addition to her
powerful public persona, she acted quietly taking on burdens without ever
seeking any recognition. She will also remain a major reference for many women
in linguistics. Many of her women colleagues felt she empowered them, and was
there to encourage them to move forward in difficult situations.

Susan's generosity extended past family, and even past the Department, to
scholars from all over the world. Her home - whether in Tübingen, Tel Aviv or
Amsterdam - was open to all, no matter what stage in their career, what
nationality, what religion, and she loved sharing meals with all of them.

Susan leaves her husband, Prof. Fred Landman, her daughter Alex, son-in-law
Itay and grandson Ezra,  her parents Michael and Vivian Rothstein of Ashkelon,
as well as two brothers and many nephews and nieces in the UK.

יהי זכרה ברוך

May Susan's memory be blessed
 


Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics



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