Sad news about Professor C. H. van Schooneveld.

[Ronald Feldstein]

Cornelis Hendrik van Schooneveld, known as “Kees” to his colleagues, passed
away on March 18, 2003, at the age of 82, in his home at Amancy, France.
He was born in ‘s-Gravenhage (The Hague), in The Netherlands, on January
19, 1921.  He first came to work at Indiana University in 1966 and retired
in 1987.

Professor van Schooneveld was a major international figure of Slavic
linguistics and linguistic publishing for many decades.  He began the study
of linguistics under tutelage of Nicolas van Wijk, at the University of
Leiden, in his native country of The Netherlands.  He first came to the
United States to study with the premier Slavic linguist of that time, Roman
Jakobson, who was teaching at Columbia University.  After receiving his
doctorate in 1949, he taught at the University of Oklahoma and Harvard
University, but then moved back to Leiden, to become chair of Slavic and
Baltic philology, from 1952-59.  In 1959, he returned to the United States,
taking a professorship at Stanford University.  In 1966, he moved to a
professorship at Indiana University, and several of his graduate students
followed him to Bloomington.

Van Schooneveld’s work built on the semantic theories of Jakobson, which
had the goal of establishing the ultimate semantic distinctive features of
Russian, but with further application to the other Slavic systems and to
language universals.  Some of van Schooneveld’s most important work
concerned the establishment of semantic features for the Russian
prepositions and verbal prefixes.  Many doctoral dissertations, based on
van Schooneveldian semantic theories, were written at IU during the 1966-87
period, which could well be called the period of van Schooneveldian
linguistics in the Indiana Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

In addition to his fame as a major figure of Prague School and Jakobsonian
linguistics, van Schooneveld was perhaps the most important person in the
area of scholarly linguistic publishing for many decades.  As the editor of
the Janua Linguarum, Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, and De
Proprietatibus Litterarum series of Mouton Publishers, van Schooneveld had
the occasion to publish hundreds of titles, including not only the work of
his teachers van Wijk and Jakobson, but the book Syntactic Structures,
which first brought Noam Chomsky to prominence, in 1957.

On a personal note, I would like to observe that in spite of his worldwide
renown, van Schooneveld was an extremely fair person on a personal level,
who made commitments and scrupulously honored them.  This was proved time
and time again in his dealings with me.  He first hired me when the Russian
Department where I worked was closed for budgetary reasons and I was on the
verge of being forced to leave the field.  Thanks to the efforts of Kees
van Schooneveld, I was able to join the Indiana Slavic Department, where I
was always given the greatest possible support for my work.  I join my
colleagues in remembering Kees’ great significance to our department and
the field of linguistics.

Ronald Feldstein

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