[Lingtyp] (a further) Haiman obituary

[Joseph Brooks]

Dear colleagues,

Here is a copy of the obituary to be published at John's last place of
employment as Professor of Linguistics at Macalester College (St. Paul,
USA). The following text will be abridged within a larger obituary
including other aspects of his life in a Macalester publication and then
appear in full in a newsletter through the Macalester linguistics
department.

--

The breadth and depth of John's lifelong work in linguistics is staggering.
In one of his earliest major publications, *Conditionals are Topics *(1978)
John showed a striking parallel between an area of thought in linguistics
and one in philosophy, which he argued represented a larger pattern found
in human language. In The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation
(1980), John's exposition of the role of iconicity in grammar (how the
structure of language reflects conceptual ordering) would upend basic
assumptions about language held up until that time. These and other key
insights were moreover directly traceable to his fieldwork on the Hua
language spoken in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, funded by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation. His (1980) description of that language was also
ground-breaking: based on 17 months of fieldwork in the 1970s, it was the
first comprehensive reference grammar of a language of New Guinea.


John did his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, where he
received his BA in Slavic Languages in 1969. He would then receive his MA
and PhD (1971) in Linguistics from Harvard University. In the 1970s, John
took up a lectureship at the Australian National University in Canberra, in
stints from 1971-1975, and then went on to teach at the University of
Manitoba. John taught linguistics at Macalester College from 1982 to
2017, where
he imparted to his students his view of language structure as shaped by
human creativity within the limits of cultural convention. In 1989, John
received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his study of sarcasm. Among other
contributions, John's passion would culminate in his (1998) book *Talk is
Cheap.*


Like many great scholars, John was not devoted to any particular approach
or theory, and his work reflects a deeply protean ethos. He always advised
his students that theories come and go, but that the most important way for
a linguist to grow was to go learn a language entirely different from one's
own, to "go there, and find the linguist" – indeed, several would go on to
conduct original fieldwork, for instance in Amazonia and Melanesia. With a
particular fondness for Rhaeto-Romance, Hua, and Khmer (Cambodian)
languages, his work remains influential in his demonstrations of how
grammatical organization comes to non-arbitrarily parallel communicative
purpose.

John's personality was also one of delightful eccentricity, and Macalester
colleagues and students will recall his beloved pet pigs that lived in his
house. Those who knew John as a linguist remember him as a polyglot, an
out-of-the-box thinker and cheerful iconoclast. He will be remembered as a
wonderful teacher and impressive scholar, one whose intimidating intellect
was matched by unusual absence of ego.
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