In Memoriam

Melissa Bowerman 1942-2011

The ICLA Board learned with great sadness that our dear and respected colleague Melissa Bowerman passed away on 31 October 2011.

Melissa Bowerman's research career began as a graduate student in Roger Brown's child language group at Harvard University, the seedbed of so much subsequent work in developmental psycholinguistics. A slightly revised version of her 1970 dissertation was published in 1973 by CUP as Early syntactic development: A cross-linguistic study with special reference to Finnish (Bowerman 1973), establishing two themes that Bowerman would continue to address throughout her career. The first was the methodological and theoretical importance of comparative and crosslinguistic studies of language, its acquisition and development. This contribution was of far-reaching significance to the future development of a field that, at the time, was almost entirely based on research on the acquisition of English. The second was her focus--nnon-exclusive, but prominent--on locative constructions, which led to an enduring interest in the crosslinguistic analysis of the grammar and semantics of space and motion.

After gaining her doctorate, Bowerman was appointed to a faculty position at the University of Kansas, and during the 1970s she published two influential Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (one co-authored), that firmly established her reputation as a world-leading researcher in child language acquisition and development. In 1982, she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, where she held the position of Senior Scientist and, later, Senior Scientist Emeritus. She also held, from 1999, an Honorary Chair at the Free University of Amsterdam.

Language acquisition and development continued, throughout her career, to be the main focus of Bowerman's research, and she was a core member of the Language Acquisition Department at the Max Planck Institute. Her research interests, however, were not confined to child language, and she was also a key founding participant in the Institute's Language and Cognition Department and its precursors, contributing enormously to its programme of crosslinguistic research on spatial language and cognition and event structure representation.

Melissa Bowerman will, perhaps, be best remembered--by language scientists as well as developmental scientists--for her pathbreaking work (in collaboration with Soonja Choi and others) on the development of the linguistic and nonlinguistic categorization of motion events in English and Korean. This research provided powerful evidence in support of a point of view that Bowerman had been developing and arguing for over many years, that patterns of language acquisition and learning, in both grammar and lexicon, are not shaped by pre-determined universal concepts and linguistic structures, but follow the language-specific mappings from meaning to expression of the target language. Her continuing research added to this the demonstration that non-linguistic categorization, too, follows language-specific developmental pathways.

Cognitive linguists, unsurprisingly, proved a receptive audience for Bowerman's rigorously argued and methodologically careful demonstrations of the shortcomings of the strong nativist programme inspired by the generativist construct of Universal Grammar. She delivered invited plenary lectures at two International Cognitive Linguistics Conferences, in Amsterdam (1997) and Seoul (2005), and was the Forum lecturer at the 8th China International Cognitive Linguistics Forum, Beijing, 2010. She was a member of the Editorial Board of Cognitive Linguistics, and co-edited a special issue of Cognitive Linguistics, "On Cutting and Breaking Events: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective", in 2007.

Melissa Bowerman's research has been immensely influential, her eminence in science and scholarship being recognised by the publication in 2008 of a Festchrift, Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman, edited by Virginia Gathercole (London and New York: Psychology Press, 2008); and by her election in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Those who knew Melissa personally join with the wider community in commemorating the life and work of a distinguished scientist and a warm and humane person. She is greatly missed.

Melissa Bowerman is survived by her husband Wijbrandt van Schuur, three daughters, Christy, Eva, and Klaartje, and four grandchildren.

Chris Sinha
President, ICLA
On behalf of the Board of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association

Updated 20 Nov 2011

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