28.3515, All: Obituary: William Davies (1954-2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3515. Thu Aug 24 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3515, All: Obituary: William Davies (1954-2017)

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Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2017 11:20:17
From: Jill Beckman [jill-beckman at uiowa.edu]
Subject: Obituary: William Davies (1954-2017)

 
It is with profound sadness that we note the passing of Professor William
Davies on August 18, 2017. After joining the linguistics faculty of the
University of Iowa in 1986, Bill was at the heart of departmental life,
serving for many years as Departmental Executive Officer, Director of Graduate
Studies, Director of English as a Second Language Programs for thirteen years
between 1990 and 2005, and as a mentor and advisor for countless PhD, MA, and
BA students in the department. As ESL Director, Bill ensured that ESL
Programs’ faculty and staff were treated as respected professionals and as
full members of the Department, and that linguistics graduate students
pursuing a focus in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) were provided
teaching experience with structured support and supervision by ESL
faculty—just one example, among many, of his strong commitment to student
success. 

Bill was a highly respected theoretical syntactician and a preeminent scholar
of Austronesian languages, focusing extensively on the syntax of raising and
control, and on the syntax and morphology of Javanese and Madurese. He
received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1981, writing
his dissertation on Choctaw clause structure. Beginning with Choctaw, and
continuing with other languages, much of Bill's research united his interests
and training in syntactic theory with his passion for language documentation
and preservation. From the early 1990s, his attraction to the languages of
Indonesia drew him first to Javanese, and then to Madurese, a language that he
worked on for some twenty years. His work on various linguistic phenomena in
Madurese culminated in 2010 in the De Gruyter Mouton A Grammar of Madurese,
the first (and only) comprehensive grammar of this language of 14 million
speakers. Bill’s theoretical work traversed a broad range of phenomena,
including wh-questions, reflexives and reciprocals, antipassives, causatives,
and (especially) raising and control. However, his theoretical work was,
invariably, coupled with efforts to give back to the people who so graciously
allowed him into their space to do his research – studying the grammar of the
Madurese while, at the same time, preserving and rendering accessible the
rapidly disappearing folk story traditions for their next generation.   

Bill taught and conducted research both at Cornell University, where he held a
Mellon postdoctoral fellowship, and at California State University,
Sacramento, prior to joining the faculty at Iowa. In addition, he served on
the faculty of two Linguistic Society of America Summer Institutes, at the
Ohio State University and the University of Chicago, and co-coordinated (with
Stan Dubinsky) National Science Foundation-funded workshops at two additional
Summer Institutes. Bill made innumerable invited and conference presentations
of his research in Indonesia, along with many other international, national,
and local venues. He published extensively, both in singly-authored works and
in collaborative work with students and colleagues—including, with long-time
collaborator Stan Dubinsky, an edited volume on the theory of grammatical
functions, two influential volumes on control and raising, and a forthcoming
textbook on language conflict and language rights. His research was funded by
a number of prestigious grants, including a National Science Foundation grant
supporting his work on the grammar of Madurese, and, more recently, grants
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NSF, and the Smithsonian
Institution, as well as the American Institute for Indonesian Studies and the
Fulbright Scholar program, for his project documenting the language of the
Baduy Dalam. Much of Bill's recent work circled back to his early roots in
anthropological linguistics, uniting his interests in culture and language
preservation with careful descriptive work, theoretical analyses, and digital
audio and video recordings and transcriptions of both Madurese and Baduy folk
stories. 

During his time on the Iowa faculty, Bill, a gifted and award-winning teacher,
particularly enjoyed teaching Linguistic Field Methods and Linguistic
Structures— two classes which allowed him to share his passion for
Austronesian linguistics with generations of students, and which ultimately
spawned many PhD dissertation and qualifying paper topics. To his PhD
students, Bill was a tireless mentor and an impeccable role model; he was
deeply proud of their accomplishments and cherished this work.

Bill was gentle, warm, compassionate, and funny (and occasionally (okay,
often) sarcastic); friends, students, and colleagues will remember his
invaluable contributions to the Department of Linguistics and to the
University of Iowa, of course, but more so his fundamental decency, his sense
of fairness, and his unceasing advocacy for his students and for the field of
linguistics. He will be deeply missed.
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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