Anna Siewierska | |
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Born | |
Died | 6 August 2011 55) | (aged
Alma mater | |
Known for | |
Spouse | Dik Bakker |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Doctoral advisor | Barry Blake |
Website | Siewierska on the website of Lancaster University |
Anna Siewierska (born Gdynia, Poland, 25 December 1955, died Da Lat, Vietnam, 6 August 2011) was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.
During her youth, Anna Siewierska spent several years in Australia, while her father worked for a Polish trade company in Melbourne. She studied linguistics at Monash University under Barry Blake, writing an M.A. thesis on passive constructions that was later published as a book [n 1] and was widely cited. [1] [2]
From 1980, she worked at the University of Gdańsk and took active part in the historic events surrounding the rise of Solidarność, working as a link between the trade union's leadership and English-speaking journalists. She received her PhD degree from Monash University in 1985, with a dissertation on word order. [n 2] [1]
Between 1990 and 1994 she was associated with the University of Amsterdam, working in Simon Dik's Functional Grammar group, before moving to Lancaster University. She was president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in 2001–2002, and president of the Association for Linguistic Typology between 2007 and 2011. [1] [3]
She was married to the Dutch linguist Dik Bakker. She died in a car accident while on holiday in Vietnam following a conference on linguistic typology in Hong Kong. [3]
Siewierska was best known for her work on world-wide comparative grammar (language typology), where she worked on a wide range of phenomena, often comparing hundreds of languages from around the world. She always had an interest in voice phenomena such as passive constructions [n 3] and impersonal constructions, [n 4] as well as the grammar of objects. [n 5] She did extensive work on word order phenomena in the world's languages. [n 6] From the mid-1990s onward, much of her typological work focused on person markers such as personal pronouns and agreement markers. [n 7] [1] [2]
Siewierska contributed significantly to building bridges in linguistics between different schools. She had an early association with Functional Grammar and other functionalist approaches to the study of language structure, but she also tried to incorporate insights from generative frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar, [n 8] from corpus linguistics, [n 9] and from cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. [n 10] [1] [2]
A complete bibliography appears in Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath. [4]
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
In grammar, a ditransitiveverb is a transitive verb whose contextual use corresponds to a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and secondary. This is in contrast to monotransitive verbs, whose contextual use corresponds to only one object.
Simon Cornelis Dik was a Dutch linguist, most famous for developing the theory of functional grammar. He occupied the chair of General Linguistics at University of Amsterdam between 1969 and 1994. During these 25 years he developed the theory of functional grammar, the foundations for which had been laid in his 1968 dissertation on coordination.
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions ; the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology or relational nouns . In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is often spoken of in terms such as Agent-Object-Verb (AOV) instead of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the pragmatic dichotomy of topic and comment.
In linguistic typology, nominative–accusative alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which subjects of intransitive verbs are treated like subjects of transitive verbs, and are distinguished from objects of transitive verbs in basic clause constructions. Nominative–accusative alignment can be coded by case-marking, verb agreement and/or word order. It has a wide global distribution and is the most common alignment system among the world's languages. Languages with nominative–accusative alignment are commonly called nominative–accusative languages.
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. Like valency found in chemistry, there is the binding of specific elements. In the grammatical theory of valency, the verbs organize sentences by binding the specific elements. Examples of elements that would be bound would be the complement and the actant.Although the term originates from valence in chemistry, linguistic valency has a close analogy in mathematics under the term arity.
Bernard Sterling Comrie, is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages.
Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by American linguist Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features. Whorf argued that the SAE languages were characterized by a number of similarities, including syntax and grammar, vocabulary and its use, as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms, and word order, which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities, in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased linguists towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to the SAE language group.
Søren Wichmann is a Danish linguist specializing in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, Mesoamerican languages, and epigraphy. Since June 2016, he has been employed as a University Lecturer at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, after having worked at different institutions in Denmark, Mexico, Germany and Russia, including, during 2003-2015, the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.
Functional grammar (FG) and functional discourse grammar (FDG) are grammar models and theories motivated by functional theories of grammar. These theories explain how linguistic utterances are shaped, based on the goals and knowledge of natural language users. In doing so, it contrasts with Chomskyan transformational grammar. Functional discourse grammar has been developed as a successor to functional grammar, attempting to be more psychologically and pragmatically adequate than functional grammar.
The Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) is a Europe-focused professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1966 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The SLE has over 1,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. Through its website, its annual meetings, and its journals Folia Linguistica and Folia Linguistica Historica, the SLE works to disseminate current research in linguistics and facilitate communication within the discipline.
Discourse Grammar (DG) is a grammatical framework that grew out of the analysis of spoken and written linguistic discourse on the one hand, and of work on parenthetical expressions, including Simon C. Dik's study of extra-clausal constituents, on the other. Initiated by Gunther Kaltenböck, Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, the framework is based on the distinction between two organizing principles of grammar where one concerns the structure of sentences and the other the linguistic organization beyond the sentence.
Cooptation is a cognitive-communicative operation whereby a piece of text, such as a clause, a phrase, a word, or any other unit, is inserted in a sentence. In the framework of Discourse Grammar, cooptation is understood as leading to the transfer of linguistic material from the domain of Sentence Grammar to that of Thetical Grammar.
Barry Blake, born 1937, is an Australian linguist, specializing in the description of Australian Aboriginal languages. He is a professor emeritus at La Trobe University Melbourne.
Vladimir Plungian is a Russian linguist, specialist in linguistic typology and theory of grammar, morphology, corpus linguistics, African studies, poetics.
Edith A. Moravcsik is a Hungarian-born American linguist.
Ekkehard König is a German linguist and Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in linguistic typology, semantics, and the linguistics of English.
Mira Ariel is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, specializing in pragmatics. A pioneer of the study of information structure, she is best known for creating and developing Accessibility Theory.