ANNA SIEWIERSKA
25 December
1955 – 6 August 2011
-
It is with great
sadness that we learned of the passing of Anna Siewierska, who died in a tragic
road accident in
Vietnam on 6
August 2011.
Her career in
linguistics spanned three decades, with many of us still referring to her very
first book on the passive
in the languages
of the world: The Passive: A Contrastive Linguistic Analysis (1984). This monograph
is distinguished
in at least two
respects. First, it was the published version of her Monash University MA, a
remarkable outcome for a
dissertation at
this level and testifying to the great promise she already held very early in
her career. Second, in it she
compared many different
theories. This comparative theoretical angle remained a considerable merit of
her research,
setting it apart
from that of many of her peers. Anna's preferences always lay with functionally
oriented theories, for
some time
especially the version of Functional Grammar developed by Simon Dik and
colleagues in Amsterdam
but more recently also
construction-based approaches. However, she included formal approaches in her
scope as well.
She was of course
most well known for her work in linguistic typology, where in addition to her
cross-theoretical perspective
she also stood out
in terms of the sheer breadth of topics she covered: voice, valence, word
order, agreement, person, and
more recently
dialect grammar. In the 1990s she coordinated the constituent order group of
the European Science
Foundation project
EUROTYP, which culminated in the very substantial volume on this topic:
Constituent Order in the
Languages of Europe
(1997). She did not only carry out her research alone, but also with others,
especially her
husband Dik
Bakker. Since 2009 she had been involved in a large collaborative project on
Referential Hierarchies in
Morphosyntax,
funded by the ESF and AHRC.
Anna was an active
member of various professional organisations, including the Philological
Society and the Linguistics
Association of Great
Britain. She had served as President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
(2002) and, at the time of
her death, was the
President of the Association of Linguistic Typology. In 2003 she was elected a
member of the
Academia Europaea.
Anna was a truly
cosmopolitan scholar, working on the full variety of the world's languages,
teaching and lecturing
around the world
and holding positions in several different countries. She was a lecturer
at the University of
Gdansk
(1980-1990), senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam
(1988-1992), and before that,
she also taught at
Monash University (1982-1984), where she obtained her PhD (1985). Since
1994 she had been
Professor of Linguistics
and Human Communications at Lancaster University. In addition to this, she was
a frequent
Visiting Professor
at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
In addition to
being an excellent researcher, Anna was an outstanding colleague and a
wonderful person. One could
always knock on
her door for some insightful work related advice, a friendly chat, and a joke
about something decidedly
unlinguistic, such
as the latest episode of 'Mad Men'. Many of us will remember her as being
extremely hard working,
but as having many
interests outside linguistics too, including hiking in the Lake District,
visiting the theatre, travelling,
and reading. She was
a great host, who would always leave one wondering where she found the energy
to entertain
her guests in the
way only she could yet be so incredibly productive professionally at the same
time.
Our deepest
feelings of sympathy naturally go out to her family first and foremost,
including her husband Dik Bakker –
but everyone who
has had the pleasure of working with and getting to know her will greatly miss
her exceptional
expertise, energy,
and warmth of character.
Barry Blake (La
Trobe University)
Willem Hollmann
(Lancaster University)
Nigel Vincent
(University of Manchester)
Anne Wichmann
(University of Central Lancashire)