29.2610, All: Obituary: Anne Vainikka

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2610. Wed Jun 20 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2610, All: Obituary: Anne Vainikka

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Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 10:00:43
From: Anne Tamm [tamm.anne at gmail.com]
Subject: Obituary: Anne Vainikka

 
Anne Vainikka died on 11 June 2018, of cancer. At the time of her death, she
was an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of
Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Her professional accomplishments are
matched by her personal virtues---strength, good humor, and devotion marked
her commitments.  She was widely known as someone who marched forward,
following ideas where they go, but with grace, determination, no untoward
bombast or self-promotion, and just straightforward arguments.

Anne received her Ph.D. in 1989 in Linguistics from the University of
Massachusetts/ Amherst, with a dissertation on Finnish syntax, the second
dissertation ever on Finnish and one which has provided the groundwork for
most work on Finnish syntax. She followed this with a series of publications
on aspects of Finnish syntax including partial null subjects, structural case
and long distance case, and had started to work on the Finnish -KIN
particle. She was working on a project on Uralic Syntax and will be missed by
the vibrant new community she helped create; this community crossed
disciplinary and paradigm boundaries by drawing modern syntacticians,
traditionally trained Uralicists, typologists, field linguists and endangered
Uralic language speakers of languages ranging from her native Finnish
to Enets, Erzya, Estonian, Hungarian, Inari Saami, Khanty, Mansi,
Mari, Nganasan, Selkup and Udmurt.

During her PhD Anne began with Tom Roeper and Jill de Villiers to work on
child language acquisition, and she solo- and co-authored a number of
well-received publications. Her work on second language acquisition began in
the late 1980s as a researcher on a project led by Harald Clahsen. She became
well known with Martha Young-Scholten for work based on adult immigrants’
acquisition of German, which culminated in their theory of Organic Grammar.
They had recently turned to the acquisition of English.  Her eye for
long-standing problems led her to establish The Verb Company to introduce the
English spelling system to emergent readers in a much more systematic way.

Anne actively mentored young scholars; her PhD student Taija Saikkonen
defended her thesis in Helsinki a few weeks before Anne died. Newcastle
University PhD student, Dongyan Chen, benefitted considerably from Anne’s
advice on applying Organic Grammar to L2 Mandarin.

Anne is survived by her husband, Inigo Thomas, director of Technology
Solutions at the Port of Wilmington, Delaware, their sons Aksel and Ashok,
and by seven sisters and a brother.

Services are on Saturday June 16, at 11 a.m. with visitation at 10 a.m. at the
Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, 2038 Pleasant Valley Road, Newark DE 19702
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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