RIP John Gumperz

[Colleen Cotter]

As Richard said, the first (non-Facebook) news came through via Jef  
Verschueren at IPrA. Below are links from Greg Myers (via the BAAL  
member list).

I was in John's last seminar in my first semester at Berkeley (playing  
hooky from the linguistics department), and have always appreciated  
his warmth and generosity as a scholar. (He came to my first-ever  
academic talk as a grad student at the BLS conference, and his smiling  
face was reassuring.) Marco Jacquemet's AAA panel last November  
brought so many of us who value the scholar and the person together.  
Thanks again, Marco and co.

Colleen Cotter
Linguistics Department
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
UK

----- Forwarded message from baal.chair at gmail.com -----
     Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 18:57:20 +0100
     From: BAAL Chair <baal.chair at gmail.com>
Reply-To: BAAL Chair <baal.chair at gmail.com>
  Subject: [Baalmail] John J. Gumperz, 1922-2013
       To: baalmail at lists.leeds.ac.uk

BAAL Members:

You may already have seen notices of the death of John Gumperz on 29 March
in Santa Barbara.  His work had a great intellectual and personal influence
on a number of members of BAAL, in such areas as interactional
sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, communicative
competence, intercultural communication, and many other fields.

There are some biographical materials here:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ANTH/emeritus/gumperz/gumpbio.html

One recent set of scholarly tributes is here:
http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/text.2011.31.issue-4/issue-files/text.2011.31.issue-4.xml

A more detailed obituary will follow.

Greg Myers


----- End forwarded message -----


Quoting Kerim Friedman <oxusnet at GMAIL.COM>:

> Dear List Members,
>
> I'm sorry to report that John Gumperz died on March 29, 2013. This is
> according to Facebook posts which (due to lack of search on Facebook) I
> cannot now retrieve, but I see that Wikipedia has already been updated
> (albeit without a citation). Google News does not yet turn up any
> obituaries.
>
> - Kerim
>
>
> --
>
>
> *P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 <http://kerim.oxus.net/>*
> *
> *
>
> Associate Professor
> Department of Indigenous Cultures
> College of Indigenous Studies
> National DongHwa University, TAIWAN
> 副教授國立東華大學民族文化學系
>



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