tribute to Suzanne Fleischman

[Elizabeth Traugott]

Many members of the lists on which the death of Suzanne
Fleischman was announced very briefly a few weeks ago have
asked for further news about her life and work.

The following is based on the University of California, Berkeley,
news release, with information about a memorial to be held on
March 11th.

Suzanne Fleischman, an internationally recognized professor of
French and Romance Philology at the University of California,
Berkeley,  died Wednesday February 2nd, aged 51.

She had taught at UC Berkeley since 1975. During her career,
Fleischman earned numerous honors, including Fulbright,
Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies and French
government fellowships, and a 1995 medal of honor for
research from the University of Helsinki. She was invited to deliver
the Zaharoff lectures in French studies at Oxford University last
year.

Fleischman earned her PhD in Romance Philology at UC Berkeley
in 1975. She received her MA in Spanish from UC Berkeley in
1971 and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan in 1969.

In addition to dozens of articles, Fleischman wrote and edited five
books: Cultural and Linguistic Factors in Word Formation: An
Integrated Approach to the Development of the Suffix '-age',
University of California Publications in Linguistics 86, Univ. of
California Press (1987); The Future in Thought and Language:
Diachronic Evidence from Romance, Cambridge Studies in
Linguistics 35, Cambridge UP (1982); Tense and Narrativity: From
Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction, Univ. of Austin Press
(1990); Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb: The Evidence from
Romance, ed. with Linda R. Waugh, Routledge, Chapman & Hall
(1991); Modality in Grammar and Discourse, ed. with Joan L.
Bybee, Benjamins (1995).

A volume of Fleischman's papers is being prepared by Dan I.
Slobin and Eve E. Sweetser.

Colleagues and friends recall Fleischman as an athletic, joyful,
witty friend and a dedicated professor. In the past several
years she devoted her energies to studying, understanding and
clarifying the relationships between language and disease, after
being diagnosed in 1993 with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood
disorder known as MDS.

At the time of her death, Fleischman was working on a book
examining the pervasiveness of the military metaphor in the
language of medicine and illness. People with illnesses are no longer
the focus of medicine, Fleischman wrote, "but merely the clinical
stage on which the main protagonists of the drama - the doctors and
the disease - battle it out". Last December, she gave a lecture on
language and medicine at a hematology conference at Mount Sinai
Hospital in New York.

Contributions to the memorial fund, which the MDS Foundation is
calling the Suzanne Fleischman Memorial Fund for MDS Patient
Outreach, may be sent to: The MDS Foundation, Box 477, 464
Main Street Crosswicks, NJ 08515. Those who wish to direct
contributions to the new MDS Patient Outreach Fund may specify
"Suzanne Fleischman Memorial Patient Outreach Fund".  Donors
who wish to earmark contributions for general research into causes
of and treatment for MDS may specify "MDS General Fund".

According to the MDS Foundation, the Suzanne Fleischman
Memorial Patient Outreach Fund will provide for patient education
conferences around the country, support MDS sufferers who cannot
afford care, and enable the MDS Foundation to reproduce and
distribute to patients a speech Fleischman gave last April in Prague,
at the International Symposium on Myelodysplastic Syndromes, in
which she outlined ways for patients to research and cope with
MDS.

A memorial gathering for Suzanne Fleischman, hosted by the
University of California at Berkeley in conjunction with her family
and friends, will take place on Saturday, March 11 2000, at 2 p.m.
in the Great Hall of the Faculty Club on the UC-Berkeley campus.