34.3636, All: Obituary Jennifer K. Spenader (1971-2023)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3636. Fri Dec 01 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3636, All: Obituary Jennifer K. Spenader (1971-2023)

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Date: 02-Dec-2023
From: Petra Hendriks [p.hendriks at rug.nl]
Subject: Obituary Jennifer K. Spenader (1971-2023)


It is with great sadness that we announce the untimely passing of our
beloved and treasured colleague and friend Jennifer K. Spenader on
November 11, 2023, at age 52, after an illness of more than a year.
Jennifer leaves behind her husband Emar Maier, who is also a dear
colleague at our university, her two daughters and her stepson.

Born in the United States, Jennifer earned a BA in Linguistics at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. After receiving her degree
in 1992, she continued to study linguistics at Stockholm University in
Sweden, where she did a PhD in Computational Linguistics under the
supervision of Östen Dahl. During her PhD, Jennifer went on a research
visit to Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, which turned out to
be pivotal to her academic as well as personal life. In Nijmegen she
was very much inspired by the work of Bart Geurts and Rob van der
Sandt in semantics and pragmatics, in particular on presuppositions.
There, she also met her future husband Emar, who was a student at
Nijmegen University at that time. After completing her PhD
dissertation on presuppositions at Stockholm University in 2002,
Jennifer continued to work there as a Senior Lecturer in Computational
Linguistics until 2005. While in Stockholm, she was offered the
opportunity by Frans Zwarts to become a postdoc at the Center for
Language and Cognition Groningen at the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands, to work on a research project on VP ellipsis, so she
moved to Groningen in 2003. A few years later, in 2005, she took up a
tenured position at this university as Assistant Professor in Language
and Cognition at the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Since
then, Jennifer taught linguistics to many cohorts of AI students.

Jennifer was enthusiastic about many topics in semantics and
pragmatics. Starting with her PhD dissertation on presuppositions, she
worked on topics such as ellipsis, pronoun interpretation, discourse
connectives, and quantification. In addition, a Veni grant she
received from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO
made it possible for her to study the rhetorical relation of contrast.
Jennifer strongly believed that our theoretical understanding of
semantic and pragmatic phenomena should be informed by empirical
methods, such as psycholinguistic experiments or corpus research.
Usually she was bubbling with ideas of how to study particular
linguistic questions empirically. Moreover, she had the determination
and drive to turn the most promising of her ideas into empirical
studies, often in collaboration with others. Some of these studies led
to important theoretical insights into children’s interpretation and
production of pronouns and the role of conservativity in children’s
acquisition of quantifiers.

When Jennifer entered a room, the room would light up with her
infectious enthusiasm and radiant energy. Even people who met her only
a few times would remember her years later because of the impression
she had made. Through her enthusiasm for languages and linguistics,
she inspired many students of AI, some of whom embarked on a career in
linguistics themselves. She was a true mentor to her students,
supporting and encouraging them in various ways and collaborating with
them on research projects and joint publications.

Although based at the AI department on the outskirts of the city of
Groningen, Jennifer often cycled to the city center to attend
linguistics events or to meet with one of her linguistics colleagues.
She had an extraordinary ability to connect to other people,
regardless of whether they were linguists or non-linguists, old or new
colleagues, professors or students. Jennifer enjoyed collaborating
with other researchers. She was thrilled about her sabbatical in 2017,
which allowed her to visit Smith College and UMass at Amherst in the
United States to collaborate with Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper on
children’s acquisition of quantifiers.

Because she had so many ideas and so many projects going on, Jennifer
often looked for ways to work more efficiently and tried out many
suggested methods she came across. According to one book on scientific
writing, by writing one hour a day it should be possible to complete
one paper per month and hence ten papers per year. Jennifer
enthusiastically pointed out to her colleagues that this would even
leave two months for holidays. However, after having tried out this
method herself, she concluded that the idea was unrealistic for
several reasons, among others that it did not take into account the
time needed for revising the papers. Jennifer generously shared these
and other experiences with her students and colleagues and reflected
on her endeavors with humor.

We will miss Jennifer very much and will remember her as a generous,
positive and caring colleague and friend.

An obituary has appeared that may be accessed online at:
https://www.newcomerstlouis.com/Obituary/270457/Jennifer-Spenader/




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