XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Short biography

Anna Siewierska – the leader in typology and European linguistics

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. [Приложение 1]

She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.

Life

Anna Siewierska spent several years in her youth in Australia, as her father was working 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 and was widely cited. She worked at the University of Gdańsk from 1980 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.

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.

The purpose of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), founded in March 1994 and currently claiming more than 600 members, is to advance the scientific study of typology, that is, of cross-linguistic diversity and the patterns underlying it. To that end ALT seeks:

• to further mutual awareness, dialogue, and co-operation within the international community of typologists;

• to give typology a higher profile within as well as outside linguistics, and in particular to act as an interest group of typologists in relation to the world of science and science funding.

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.

Contributions

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. [Приложение 2]

She always had an interest in voice phenomena such as passive constructions and impersonal constructions, as well as the grammar of objects. She did extensive work on word order phenomena in the world's languages. From the mid-1990s onward, much of her typological work focused on person markers such as personal pronouns and agreement markers.

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 (LFG is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of transformational grammar which was current in the late 1970s. It mainly focuses on syntax, including its relation with morphology and semantics.), from corpus linguistics (corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field in its natural context ("realia"), and with minimal experimental-interference), and from cognitive linguistics (CL) is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics) and construction grammar (CxG is a family of theories which posit that human language consists of constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic forms with functions or meanings.)

Selected works

A complete bibliography appears in Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.

Hengeveld, Kees, Jan Rijkhoff & Anna Siewierska. 2004. Parts of speech systems as a basic typological parameter. Journal of Linguistics 40.2: 527–570.

Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2007. A construction grammar account of possessive constructions in Lancashire dialect: Some advantages and challenges. English Language and Linguistics 11: 407–424.

Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2011. The status of frequency, schemas, and identity in cognitive sociolinguistics: A case study on definite article reduction. Cognitive Linguistics 22.1: 25–54.

Malchukov, Andrej, & Anna Siewierska (eds.). 2011. Impersonal constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Siewierska, Anna. 1984. The passive: A comparative linguistic analysis. London: Routledge.

Siewierska, Anna. 1988. Word order rules. Kent: Croom Helm.

Siewierska, Anna. 1991. Functional grammar. London: Routledge.

Siewierska, Anna. 1993. Subject and object order in written Polish: Some statistical data. Folia Linguistica 27. 1/2, 147–169.

Siewierska, Anna. 1998a. Nominal and verbal person marking. Linguistic Typology 2, 1–53.

Siewierska, Anna. 1998b. Languages with and without objects. Languages in Contrast 1.2: 173–190.

Siewierska, Anna (ed.) 1998. Constituent order in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Siewierska, Anna. 1999a. Reduced pronominals and argument prominence. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG 99 Conference. Stanford: CSIL Publications.

Siewierska, Anna. 1999b. From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: Why objects don't make it. Folia Linguistica 33/2: 225–251.

Siewierska, Anna. 2003. Person agreement and the determination of alignment. Transactions of the Philological Society 101.2, 339–370.

Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Siewierska, Anna. 2005a. Verbal person marking. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 414–417. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available online here.)

Siewierska, Anna. 2005b. Passive constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available online here.)

Siewierska, Anna. 2006. Linguistic typology: Where functionalism and formalism almost meet. In A. Duszak & U. Okulska (eds.), Bridges and walls in metalinguistic discourse. Berlin: Peter Lang, 57–76.

Siewierska, Anna & Dik Bakker. 2005. The agreement cross-reference continuum: Person marking in Functional Grammar. In: Kees Hengeveld & Casper de Groot (eds.), Morphosyntactic expression in Functional Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 203–248.

The list of resources:

1. wikipedia.org

2. https://lancaster.academia.edu

3. https://www.researchgate.net

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