29.599, All: Obituary: Matti Rissanen (1937-2018)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-599. Mon Feb 05 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.599, All: Obituary: Matti Rissanen (1937-2018)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2018 15:18:27
From: Terttu Nevalainen [terttu.nevalainen at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Obituary: Matti Rissanen (1937-2018)

 
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Matti Rissanen,
Professor Emeritus of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, at the
age of 80 on 24 January 2018. He was a pioneer in English historical corpus
linguistics, and the director of the project that produced the Helsinki Corpus
of English Texts, which covers a thousand years of the history of English and
has been used widely since its publication in 1991. 

Matti Rissanen was one of the rare scholars to command the history of the
English language from its early stages to the present, beginning with his PhD
thesis (1967) on the Old English numeral ONE. His wide range of publications
includes a number of original articles and several co-edited volumes of
corpus-based research, such as Early English in the Computer Age (1993),
English in Transition and Grammaticalization at Work (1997), as well as the
much cited chapter on Early Modern English syntax in The Cambridge History of
the English Language (vol. 3, 1999). Also taking an active interest in early
American English, he was one of the international team that re-edited the
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009).

Active in numerous professional organizations, Matti Rissanen served as
president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea and chaired the Board of the
International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME). He was
the founder and first director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts
and Change in English (VARIENG), an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence
from 2000 to 2011. He was also a driving force in the foundation of the
Finnish Institute in London and the Language Centre of the University of
Helsinki. In recognition of his achievements Matti Rissanen received many
awards, including an honorary doctorate of the University of Uppsala, Sweden,
and being elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He was an
Honorary member of the Modern Language Society, the International Society of
Anglo-Saxonists, and the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies. 

Unfailing optimism was the most striking characteristic of Matti's. He was a
supervisor to generations of students, and his amiable and good-humoured
encouragement and support to undergraduate and doctoral students as well as
colleagues both in Finland and abroad were beyond compare. Matti's retirement
in 2001 did not mark an end to his research activities. His philological
expertise made an instrumental contribution to the publication project that
resulted in a new Finnish translation of all Shakespeare’s works. One of his
long-lasting research interests was the history of English connectives, on
which he was working to the very last days of his life.

Matti Rissanen will be greatly missed by his family and a wide circle of
friends and colleagues. Those who would like to share their memories and
recollections of him are welcome to do so by adding them as comments (in
English or Finnish) to the VARIENG blog post at
https://variblog.wordpress.com/.

Links:
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/matti-rissanen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Rissanen
 


Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-29-599	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/