30.844, All: Obituary: Wallace Chafe

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-844. Fri Feb 22 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.844, All:  Obituary: Wallace Chafe

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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 10:29:27
From: Mary Bucholtz [bucholtz at ucsb.edu]
Subject: Obituary: Wallace Chafe

 
It is with great sadness that the Department of Linguistics at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, announces the passing of our dear friend and
colleague Professor Wallace (Wally) Chafe, at the age of 91, on February 3,
2019. An exceptionally deep-thinking and broad-ranging scholar, Professor
Chafe produced over 230 books, articles, and other publications on semantics,
discourse, prosody, cognition, and Native American languages which have been
foundational to functional and usage-based approaches to linguistics.

Following a stint in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Professor Chafe attended
Yale University, where he received a BA in German Literature (1950) and an MA
(1956) and PhD (1958) in Linguistics. He began fieldwork on the Seneca
language in 1956, initiating a relationship with the Seneca community that
continued until his death more than sixty years later. Following completion of
his doctorate at Yale, Professor Chafe worked for the Bureau of American
Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, where he began to study the Caddo
language, also a lifelong pursuit. 

In 1962, Professor Chafe joined the faculty in Linguistics at the University
of California at Berkeley, where he served as department chair from 1969 to
1974 and from 1977 to 1978, and as director of the Survey of California and
Other Indian Languages from 1975 until 1986. At that point, he—together with
his wife and fellow linguist Professor Marianne Mithun—moved to UC Santa
Barbara. Professor Chafe retired in 1991 but continued to hold the
distinguished title of Research Professor and remained actively engaged with
the UCSB Department of Linguistics. In 2008, he received the Constantine
Panunzio Distinguished Emeritus Award, the University of California’s top
honor for emeriti faculty.

Professor Chafe’s research in linguistics was wide in scope but unified by a
drive to understand the interrelationship between language and the mind. He
began this exploration with the study of semantics, later expanding his work
to incorporate the nature of epistemology, cognition, and consciousness
itself. At the center of his work is the idea that language both reflects and
shapes the flow of thought and that this process is regulated by prosody in
the production of spoken discourse. His interest in the role of time and
consciousness in language encompassed a wide variety of issues, including the
comparison of spoken and written discourse, the relationship between given and
new information, and the function and classification of intonation units. His
influential insights on these topics are collected in his major statement
Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious
Experience in Speaking and Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Professor Chafe’s scholarship in other linguistic areas was equally seminal,
including the famous Pear Stories project, which provided an innovative
methodology for comparing discourse features across typologically diverse
languages (The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of
Narrative Production, Ablex 1980); his groundbreaking work on evidentiality
with Professor Johanna Nichols (Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of
Epistemology, Ablex, 1986); and his magisterial study of laughter, humor, and
emotion (The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling Behind Laughter and
Humor, John Benjamins, 2007). His final theoretical book, Thought-Based
Linguistics: How Languages Turn Thoughts into Sounds (Cambridge University
Press, 2018) is his most provocative, laying out a strong argument that the
study of thoughts should be central to linguistics. 

Professor Chafe also produced extensive and important scholarship in Native
American linguistics, including grammars of Seneca (A Grammar of the Seneca
Language, University of California Press, 2015) and Caddo (The Caddo Language:
A Grammar, Texts, and Dictionary Based on Materials Collected by the Author in
Oklahoma between 1960 and 1970, Mundart Press, 2018) and the relationships
among these and other language families (The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan
Languages, Mouton, 1976). Professor Chafe was honored for his contributions to
the preservation of Native American languages at a symposium held at the
Louvain Institute in Belgium in 2005.

Professor Chafe’s scholarly memoir, originally published in 2002 in
Historiographia Linguistica, appears on his UCSB website:
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/chafe/memoir.htm.

Those who knew him remember Wally as a kind and gentle man as well as a
beloved friend and mentor. He and Marianne opened their home and their hearts
to twenty-five years of UCSB linguists, creating a warm community and a
welcoming space for intellectual dialogue and debate. He will be deeply missed
by his colleagues, students, friends, and family. People wishing to honor his
legacy are invited to contribute to UCSB’s Chafe and Mithun Fund for Research
on Understudied Languages: https://giving.ucsb.edu/Funds/Dept/linguistics.
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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