linguistlist.org>
Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>
csli.Stanford.EDU>Many members of the lists on which the death of Suzanne Fleischman was announced very briefly a few weeks ago have asked for further news about her life and work. The following is based on the University of California, Berkeley, news release, with information about a memorial to be held on March 11th. Suzanne Fleischman, an internationally recognized professor of French and Romance Philology at the University of California, Berkeley, died Wednesday February 2nd, aged 51. She had taught at UC Berkeley since 1975. During her career, Fleischman earned numerous honors, including Fulbright, Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies and French government fellowships, and a 1995 medal of honor for research from the University of Helsinki. She was invited to deliver the Zaharoff lectures in French studies at Oxford University last year. Fleischman earned her PhD in Romance Philology at UC Berkeley in 1975. She received her MA in Spanish from UC Berkeley in 1971 and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan in 1969. In addition to dozens of articles, Fleischman wrote and edited five books: Cultural and Linguistic Factors in Word Formation: An Integrated Approach to the Development of the Suffix '-age', University of California Publications in Linguistics 86, Univ. of California Press (1987); The Future in Thought and Language: Diachronic Evidence from Romance, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 35, Cambridge UP (1982); Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction, Univ. of Austin Press (1990); Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb: The Evidence from Romance, ed. with Linda R. Waugh, Routledge, Chapman & Hall (1991); Modality in Grammar and Discourse, ed. with Joan L. Bybee, Benjamins (1995). A volume of Fleischman's papers is being prepared by Dan I. Slobin and Eve E. Sweetser. Colleagues and friends recall Fleischman as an athletic, joyful, witty friend and a dedicated professor. In the past several years she devoted her energies to studying, understanding and clarifying the relationships between language and disease, after being diagnosed in 1993 with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder known as MDS. At the time of her death, Fleischman was working on a book examining the pervasiveness of the military metaphor in the language of medicine and illness. People with illnesses are no longer the focus of medicine, Fleischman wrote, "but merely the clinical stage on which the main protagonists of the drama - the doctors and the disease - battle it out". Last December, she gave a lecture on language and medicine at a hematology conference at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Contributions to the memorial fund, which the MDS Foundation is calling the Suzanne Fleischman Memorial Fund for MDS Patient Outreach, may be sent to: The MDS Foundation, Box 477, 464 Main Street Crosswicks, NJ 08515. Those who wish to direct contributions to the new MDS Patient Outreach Fund may specify "Suzanne Fleischman Memorial Patient Outreach Fund". Donors who wish to earmark contributions for general research into causes of and treatment for MDS may specify "MDS General Fund". According to the MDS Foundation, the Suzanne Fleischman Memorial Patient Outreach Fund will provide for patient education conferences around the country, support MDS sufferers who cannot afford care, and enable the MDS Foundation to reproduce and distribute to patients a speech Fleischman gave last April in Prague, at the International Symposium on Myelodysplastic Syndromes, in which she outlined ways for patients to research and cope with MDS. A memorial gathering for Suzanne Fleischman, hosted by the University of California at Berkeley in conjunction with her family and friends, will take place on Saturday, March 11 2000, at 2 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Faculty Club on the UC-Berkeley campus.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue