36.1873, All: In Memorian Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)

Tue Jun 17 00:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1873. Tue Jun 17 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1873, All: In Memorian Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)

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Date: 14-Jun-2025
From: Hans C. Boas [hcb at mail.utexas.edu]
Subject: In Memorian Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)

In Memoriam Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)
It is with great sadness that we share the news that our colleague Dr.
Miriam R. L. Petruck died April 1, 2025, after a brief
hospitalization. A memorial service was held for her two days later at
Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, California, where she had been a
member for many decades, followed by interment at Gan Shalom Cemetery
in Briones, California.
Dr. Petruck was born April 11, 1952. She received her B.A. in
Linguistics from Stony Brook University in New York in 1972 and her
M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in
1976. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the
University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Charles J. Fillmore as
the head of her dissertation committee. Her dissertation on Hebrew
body-part metaphors combined two of her lifelong interests, the
scientific study of the Hebrew language and Cognitive Linguistics. Her
dissertation was the first one to apply Frame Semantics to linguistic
analysis. She became involved in the major research projects which
Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the
1990s, developing the twin theories of Frame Semantics and
Construction Grammar.  She participated in the discussions leading to
the creation of the FrameNet project (the practical implementation of
Frame Semantics) in 1997, helping to define frames and to annotate
some of the data in the FrameNet database.
For the rest of her life, she continued to publish and speak about
both theories (particularly about Frame Semantics and its application
to NLP), at conferences and seminars around the world. Over the last
three decades, Dr. Petruck published over thirty articles on Frame
Semantics, FrameNet, and the MetaNet project on metaphor in a variety
of conference proceedings, edited volumes, and academic journals. In
2018, she published an edited volume on MetaNet. She visited and wrote
papers with co-authors from many countries based on applying  these
theories to English, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Hebrew, and other
languages. She maintained friendships and correspondence with a wide
range of scholars and students, and frequently hosted visitors at her
home in Berkeley.
Dr. Petruck held a variety of academic positions, including
post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Visiting
Assistant Professor at Peking University, Instructor at the University
of California, Davis, and Senior Research Scientist at the FrameNet
project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
Dr. Petruck also held several invited positions, including guest
researcher at the University of Gothenburg and Visiting Professor at
the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her
research was recognized by a number of awards, including a
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship
(Israel), the Laurence Urdang Award of the Dictionary Society of North
America, and an NSF grant to conduct a FrameNet workshop at the
International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. More recently,
she received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to create a
FrameNet-inspired database of structured information about the
experiences of Holocaust survivors.
Besides making valuable scholarly contributions to the theory of Frame
Semantics and its practical implementation in the FrameNet project,
Dr. Petruck had an enormous impact on how FrameNet was perceived by
the international scholarly community. Dr. Petruck was a key figure
promoting FrameNet at academic workshops, conferences, and other
events by talking to colleagues in lexicography, computer science, and
theoretical syntax and semantics about FrameNet. She also set up the
FrameNet group on Facebook and had maintained it for several years.
She regularly established contacts with other research groups, thereby
helping to build interest in FrameNet and conveying to colleagues what
FrameNet is all about. Closer to home, over more than two decades, Dr.
Petruck always had time to help undergraduate students, graduate
students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars from around the
world to get acquainted with the FrameNet project, and made sure that
every newcomer to FrameNet felt welcome at the International Computer
Science Institute.
Dr. Petruck is survived by a sister in New York, as well as a sister,
a brother, several nephews and nieces, and her mother in Israel.
Collin F. Baker (International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley)
and Hans C. Boas (The University of Texas at Austin)

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Lexicography

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Hebrew (heb)

Language Family(ies): Indo-European
                      Semitic

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